trilateration

trilateration, method of surveying in which the lengths of the sides of a triangle are measured, usually by electronic means, and, from this information, angles are computed. By constructing a series of triangles adjacent to one another, a surveyor can obtain other distances and angles that would not otherwise be measurable. Formerly, trilateration was little used in comparison to triangulation, a method for determining two sides and an angle of a triangle from the length of one side and two angles, because of the difficulty of the computations involved. But the development of electronic distance-measuring devices has made trilateration a common and preferred system. Except that only lines are measured, while all angles are computed, the field procedures for trilateration are like those for triangulation.