Jens Peder Kristensen is the CEO of Denmark-based TinyMobileRobots. The company's marquee product, the TinySurveyor, is predictably small. But the technology has the potential to make a big impact in land surveying. Kristensen was working in the agriculture industry at the time, when he met a land surveyor and a robotics researcher who were testing a robot for measuring the slope of newly built highways. 

“Typically, when you pave, at least in Europe, you have several layers or pavements,” Kristensen explains. “So, it turns out to be a very, very hard job for the land surveyors working with a total station manually measuring these layers of pavements.” First to use a GPS to find the measurement point. Then to use a total station to measure the slope and move to another point.