How do technicians locate equipment in a refinery without GPS?

A visual positioning system matches what the camera sees against a pre-built 3D map of the plant. MultiSet returns absolute position and orientation from a single camera frame, inside steel structures, under pipe racks and on platforms where satellite signal is blocked or degraded. No beacons and no markers on equipment.

Does it work in a plant that changes, with scaffolding and shutdowns?

Yes. Localization holds through the visual change scaffolding and moved equipment create, and a changed area can be re-scanned and merged into the same coordinate frame without re-authoring anchors or routes. Every stored position is traceable to the map version it was captured against.

Can it use our plant grid and our equipment tags?

Yes. Maps accept plant grid or local survey coordinates with an EPSG code and georeference to WGS 84, so poses come back as latitude, longitude and heading. Your functional location and equipment tags stay the join key. We hold a coordinate and a pointer, never a copy of your asset master.

What scan data can I use to build the map?

Any of it. E57, LiDAR point clouds, Matterport exports, 3D Gaussian Splats, 360 video, CCTV footage and CAD or BIM all convert into localization maps. The capture you already own becomes the map, and you keep it.

Spatial Ground Truth for Energy Operations

Q: What devices can workers use in a classified area?

MultiSet is software and runs on the camera your team is already permitted to carry, including intrinsically-safe-certified wearables and tablets rated for hazardous areas. We do not certify hardware and make no intrinsic safety claim of our own.

Q: Can MultiSet run on-premises or on-device?

Yes. Public cloud, private cloud, self-hosted and on-device. In self-hosted and on-device modes, no maps, images or spatial queries leave your infrastructure.

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Read the Docs

Augmented Reality for Oil and Gas Operations

One reference frame for the whole site

From tank farm to unit interior.
Position and orientation, so the overlay lands on the asset and not near it.
Built from capture you already own, in the formats you already hold.
Public cloud through to air-gapped, on the same API.

A technician with a tablet on a walkway in a refinery process unit at dusk, with markers on a pump, a valve and a vessel, and a label reading PUMP P-204, EL. +12.4 M

Why the twin stops at the fence line

A robot that cannot say where it is cannot act. Not roughly which room, but the exact position and orientation, in a frame something else can also read.

The Gap Between the Digital Twin and the Field

Nobody made a mistake. The information exists and it stops at the door.

A satellite fix greyed out beneath a steel pipe rack while a camera-based position stays locked.

A single walkdown repeated by several different functions, each logging the same trip separately.

A work order, a parts record and a 3D model each pointing at a different valve in a row of identical valves, none able to say which one is meant.

Satellite positioning fails where the work is

Steel superstructures, pipe racks and vessel interiors block GNSS. The dangerous case is not total denial but partial denial, where a receiver keeps reporting a position that is confidently wrong and nothing downstream knows to distrust it.

The cost is real and nobody owns it

Repeat walkdowns, travel to remote sites, duplicated surveys, revised lifting plans, decisions taken conservatively under physical uncertainty. It is paid across engineering, maintenance, operations, projects, inspection and HSE, so no single budget sees the bill and no single business case gets written.

Every system models the asset. None locates it.

The CMMS holds the work order, the ERP holds the part, the twin holds the geometry. Each is correct and each assumes somebody already knows which asset is in front of them. That assumption is the gap.

Asset Finding and Work Instructions, Upstream to Downstream

One map, and the information arrives where the work happens.

A contractor walking a routed path through a refinery during a turnaround, with a shaded zone marking an area the route avoids

Turnaround and contractor guidance

A shutdown fills the site with people who have never been in it. Contractors localize on entry and route to the assigned asset, ranked by walking time rather than straight-line distance, with restricted and permit-only areas excluded from the route.

A technician with a tablet at a process pump, the pump outlined and an information panel anchored to it by a leader line

Point-of-work information

Work orders, procedures and equipment history anchored to the asset itself, read from the systems that already hold them. The record stays where it is. We hold the coordinate and the tag that points to it.

An inspector reading a gauge on a process vessel, with a marker on the walkway recording the position the reading was taken from

Inspection rounds and evidence of work

Route the inspector, confirm which asset a reading belongs to, and record the position it was taken from so the next visit reproduces the same view.

Object Tracking for Inspection and Isolation

Object Tracking recognizes a specific pump, valve or skid from its CAD or scan model and localizes against the asset rather than the room. For isolation checks, inspection and close-quarters work.

Ingest

Build the map from capture you already own. E57 and LiDAR point clouds, Matterport, Leica, NavVis, Faro, XGRIDS, 3D Gaussian Splats, 360 video, CAD or BIM. Use the right instrument per zone, aerial for the tank farm and handheld for the unit interior, and stitch them into one frame.

Localize

A single camera frame returns position and orientation in the plant frame. Georeference the map and the same pose comes back as latitude, longitude and heading, so a GIS or twin stack that already speaks those keeps speaking them.

Stay true

Scheduled re-checks hold the registration true through scaffolding, shutdowns and moved equipment. Map versioning keeps a partial re-scan in the same frame, and every position stays traceable to the version it was captured against.

Drone capture of a tank farm and handheld scanning inside a process unit merging into one map.

A phone, a headset and a tablet each returning a position and orientation from the same plant map.

A process unit re-scanned during a turnaround, with anchors and routes holding their positions.

Scan-Agnostic Localization, Built as Infrastructure

Scan-agnostic

Build the map from E57, LiDAR, Matterport, 3DGS, 360 video, CAD or BIM. No proprietary scanner, no re-capture.

Cold-start localization

Absolute 6-DoF pose from a single camera frame on wake. No exploration run.

Two primitives, one SDK

VPS for the environment, Object Tracking for the equipment. Same map, same SDK.

Built for changing plants

Relocalization holds through scaffolding, shutdowns and moved equipment. A changed area is re-scanned into the same frame, and anchors and routes carry over.

Your map, your infrastructure

Public cloud, private cloud, self-hosted or fully on-device. In self-hosted and on-device modes, no maps, images or spatial queries leave your infrastructure.

Bounded drift

Periodic absolute relocalization holds onboard drift inside a stated tolerance.

Every platform

ROS 2, REST APIs, Unity, iOS, Android, WebXR and headsets ship from the same map.

On-Prem and Air-Gapped Positioning for OT Environments

A plant layout is competitive information. Where equipment sits, how material moves, what changed last turnaround. On regulated and defence-adjacent sites it cannot leave the building at all.

MultiSet runs where your compliance team says it can live, from public cloud to a fully air-gapped floor, on the same API and the same map. What we store is a coordinate, a map reference and a tag that points back to your system. The asset master never moves.

It fits the frame you already run: plant grid or local survey coordinates with an EPSG code, georeferenced to WGS 84, poses returned as latitude, longitude and heading. It runs on the devices your teams are already permitted to carry, including intrinsically-safe-certified wearables and tablets.

Diagram showing private cloud, on-prem and on-device deployment connecting to one MultiSet core that serves warehouse, factory, construction, healthcare and tunnel environments

Single-Capture and Multi-Capture Site Coverage Compared

	Single-capture approach	Multi-capture approach
How a site is covered	One scan, one map, one instrument	Many scans joined into one coordinate frame
Past one scan's range	Coverage stops	Add a map and it aligns against the set
Instrument choice	Whatever the pipeline accepts	Aerial for open areas, handheld for interiors, survey data where it exists
When an area changes	Re-capture the whole map	Re-scan the changed area into the same frame
Where the frame comes from	The vendor's pipeline	Your plant grid, georeferenced to WGS 84

Stated plainly: a refinery is never one scan. It is dozens, taken with different instruments over months, and the question is whether they compose into one frame or stay separate maps that each stop at their own edge.

Two related explainers: GPS-denied navigation covers what happens when the satellite fix degrades rather than disappears, and E57 to VPS covers how a scan you already hold becomes a localization map.

Oil and Gas VPS:
Frequently Asked Questions

One Frame for Every Contractor on Site

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