The Development of a Direct Georeferencing Ready UAV based photogrammetry platform

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. In this study, a fixed-wing UAV based spatial information collection platform is proposed. The proposed UAV based platform has a direct georeferencing ready module including an integrated GPS/INS system, low cost digital camera as well as other common UAV modules including immediately video monitoring communication system, and other sensors mounted on the platform. It is relatively safe and cheap to collect the spatial information that we need to urgent response such as disaster relief and assessment. The preliminarily results indicates that the 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. They also can be applied for producing 1/5000 aerial photo map for national land resources investigation and general navigation applications. In addition to those conventional mapping applications, recent disaster assessment results after devastating Typhoon Morakt are also presented in this study. * Corresponding author: M.L.Tsa