Development of a Uav-based Remote Sensing System for Unpaved Road Condition Assessment

This paper discusses an Unmanned Aviation Vehicle (UAV)-based remote sensing system for unpaved road condition assessment. The reported work has been part of the project “Monitoring of Unpaved Road Condition using Remote Sensing and Other Technology”, sponsored by the US Department of Transportation. The system is based on a low cost model helicopter equipped with a GPS/IMU and a geomagnetic sensor to detect the position, attitude and velocity of the helicopter. An autonomous controller was employed to control helicopter to fly along a predefined flight path and reach the desired positions. At the ground station, a computer was used to communicate with the helicopter in real-time to monitor flight parameters and send out control commands. The entire processing system includes camera calibration, integrated sensor orientation, digital 3D road surface model and orthoimage generation, automated feature extraction and measurement for road condition assessment. In this paper, we introduce our general strategy for road monitoring and the configuration of the UAV mapping system. The initial results of the analysis of road imagery collected by the UAV for detection of road distress in a test site are also presented.