Unmanned aerial systems for data acquisitions in disaster management applications

The potentiality of the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) has already been proved by the military community, which has employed aircrafts without men on-board for reconnaissance missions and attack operations in the enemy field. The technological progress in the electronic and aerospace engineering fields allowed the development of low-cost UAVs characterized by a small size (mini-UAVs) and low weight, that can carry on-board imaging or non-imaging sensors. These advantageous features led the civil community to have an increasing interest in mini-UAVs. The excellent flight performances, the suitability for various types of missions, the inexpensiveness, and the capability to carry on-board different sensors, allow mini-UAVs to be employed in various missions. Nowadays, these systems allow to carry out missions in the following fields: land monitoring, remote sensing, agriculture and public security. Also the photogrammetric community has taken part to the research issues concerning the use of UAVs for map production. The research group of Geomatics of the Politecnico di Torino has developed a set of interchangeable pods that can be mounted on a mini-UAV (a Hexacopter by Mikrokopter) devoted to emergency management in case of environmental disasters.This instrument is a low-cost mini-UAV equipped with photogrammetric sensors and capable of autonomous navigation (real time GNSS/IMU) and automatic digital image acquisition (characterized by a suitable geometric and radiometric quality). The platform is easily transportable on normal aircrafts and usable on the field, autonomously, by a couple of operators. The main innovation is to permits a real direct photogrammetric surveys in remote and disaster-affected areas in a short-range operative zone where it is not possible to carry out traditional photogrammetric flights. The acquisition technique allows the update of existing maps. Nevertheless, some test flights and practical applications have been performed in order to assess the autonomous flight performances and the suitability for photogrammetric flights.