Topcon Enters Worldwide Mobile Control Market

Topcon Corporation (CA, USA) is expanding its business to include the rapidly growing international mobile control business.

For Topcon, entering the "mobile control business is a natural extension of our basic business model," according to Fumio Ohtomo, director and managing executive officer. "The mobile control market is a growing market and is a perfect match for Topcon's GPS technologies and products developed over many years in the industry." The emphasis on a new market niche will enable Topcon to become a "complete positioning business," Ohtomo said.

The new mobile business segment will focus on measuring the exact positioning of virtually any mobile object on Earth for asset management and control purposes.

Target markets for this new Topcon business segment include:
- Dynamic positioning (DP) of oil platforms and vessels, as well as facilities and offshore services, including container positioning and locations, berthing navigation, as well as equipment used in natural resource exploration;
- Vehicle management, including fleet logistics for taxis, trains, buses, trucks, rental vehicles, and even golf carts, and;
- Environmental research, including disaster prevention and meteorological research and data collection.

In April Topcon announced its SiteLINK system, which uses software to record all relevant machine data on heavy equipment regardless of where in the world it is located. In addition to monitoring basic machine functions - like oil pressure, temperature and hours of use via CAN bus or analog connections - data that can be collected, stored and processed for individual machines include geometry files and real-time machine position.