Rice & Associates

Rice Associates is a geospatial services firm providing in-house photogrammetry, LiDAR scanning (mobile, airborne and terrestrial), building information modeling, conventional surveying and subsurface utility designation and mapping. The firm was founded in 1986 (SWaM Certified #8406S) and is headquartered in Manassas, Virginia and maintains branch offices in Richmond and Virginia Beach. Rice Associates has a full-time staff of 67 personnel including ten licensed surveyors, eight photogrammetrists, four subsurface utility designators and multiple field and office technicians that possess a high level understanding of project requirements from project planning through project delivery. The firm performs over 200 significant survey projects on an annual basis with over 90 percent of this work performed within the Commonwealth of Virginia. Project types include rural roadways, interstate highways, bridge structures, airports, storm and sanitary sewer facilities, parks, trails, wetlands, public space developments, and facilities. In terms of advanced capabilities, Rice Associates is a very innovative firm that helped pioneer the use of Global Positioning Systems (GPS) in the Commonwealth of Virginia. The firm's commitment to using the latest in technology has spanned 27 years and continues today with Leica's state-of-the-art high definition LIDAR ScanStations. For over six years Rice Associates has utilized Leica's static terrestrial scanners to map highways, bridges, tunnels and buildings, and to further expand its capabilities, the firm recently purchased the Leica Pegasus:One which is a complete mobile mapping solution from hardware to post-processing. This system captures calibrated imagery and point cloud data and enables processing, visualization, and interpretation through a single, user-intuitive software platform. It provides plug-and-play hardware including cameras and LIDAR sensors enabled by a complete software solution including data acquisition, calibration, post-processing, viewing, editing and storage modules. Unlike many mobile mapping systems the Pegasus does not require dedicated or modified vehicles. The addition of the mobile scanning capability to Rice Associates' geospatial services toolbox truly allows it to be a one-stop shop. In addition to LIDAR scanning, Rice Associates is one of only a few survey-only firms that offer in-house photogrammetric capabilities in the Mid-Atlantic region.