The development of a UAV based mms platform and its applications

In order to facilitate the applications such as environment detection, military security, or disaster monitoring, developing a quickly and low cost system to collect near real time spatial information is very important. Such a rapid spatial information collection capability has become an emerging trend in the technology of remote sensing and mapping application. However, there are some advantages and disadvantages with conventional aerial or ground base platforms. In this study, a fixed-wing Unmanned Airborne Vehicle (UAV) based spatial information collection platform is proposed. The proposed UAV based platform has a direct georeferencing ready module including an integrated Global Positioning System (GPS) and Inertial Navigation System (INS), low cost digital camera as well as other common UAV modules including immediately video monitoring communication system, and other sensors mounted on the platform. The preliminarily results indicates that the Ground Sample Distance (GSD) reaches 6 centimeters and 3-D positioning accuracy reaches 10 centimeters when the flight height is 300 meters. Such specification can be applied for 1/1000 topographic mapping. When the flight height is 600 and 900 meters, the GSDs are 17 and 19 centimeters respectively, the 3-D positioning accuracy reaches 23 and 50 centimeters respectively. Furthermore, the proposed platform can be used for 1/2500 topographic mapping application. In addition, they can be applied for producing 1/5000 aerial photo map for national land resources investigation and general navigation applications. Besides, we also conduct the Digital Elevation Model (DEM) by using numerical photogrammetry workstation. The elevation accuracy of the check points is 0.144 meters and the positioning accuracy of x and y axis is 0.049 and 0.027 meters. Moreover, the proposed platform was sent for collecting the spatial information for disaster assessment after devastating Typhoon Morakt that hit southern Taiwan hard during summer 2009. It is also presented in this study.