The concept for an airborne LIFT instrument was developed by Zbigniew Kolber at Rutgers University in 1998. The first field test was conducted at Biosphere 2 in Arizona in 2002 using a stationary large LIFT setup equipped with a laser operating at a distance of up to 50 meters. The prototype instrument was later refined and improved at the Carnegie Institute, Stanford, and the Agricultural Research Center in Arizona, where the first attempt to operate it on a tractor frame was made. In 2010 several instruments were transferred from Carnegie to the Forschungszentrum Jülich where they are used for laboratory and field research in robotic positioning systems for non-invasive, high-throughput data acquisition.