Techniques for automatic adaptive scanning with a laser scanner include obtaining range measurements at a coarse angular resolution and forming a horizontally sorted range gate subset and a characteristic range. A fine angular resolution is determined automatically based on the characteristic range and a target spatial resolution. If the fine angular resolution is finer than the coarse angular resolution, then a minimum and maximum vertical angle is automatically determined in each horizontal slice extending a bin size from any previous horizontal slice. A set of adaptive minimum and maximum vertical angles is determined automatically by dilating and interpolating the minimum and maximum vertical angles of all the slices to the second horizontal angular resolution. A horizontal start angle, and the set of adaptive minimum and maximum vertical angles are sent to cause the ranging system to obtain measurements at the second angular resolution.