UAV Deployment Exercise for Mapping Purposes: Evaluation of Emergency Response Applications.

Piero Boccardo,Fabio Tonolo,Furio Dutto,Filiberto Chiabrando,Andrea Lingua

doi:10.3390/s150715717

Abstract

Exploiting the decrease of costs related to UAV technology, the humanitarian community started piloting the use of similar systems in humanitarian crises several years ago in different application fields, i.e., disaster mapping and information gathering, community capacity building, logistics and even transportation of goods. Part of the author’s group, composed of researchers in the field of applied geomatics, has been piloting the use of UAVs since 2006, with a specific focus on disaster management application. In the framework of such activities, a UAV deployment exercise was jointly organized with the Regional Civil Protection authority, mainly aimed at assessing the operational procedures to deploy UAVs for mapping purposes and the usability of the acquired data in an emergency response context. In the paper the technical features of the UAV platforms will be described, comparing the main advantages/disadvantages of fixed-wing versus rotor platforms. The main phases of the adopted operational procedure will be discussed and assessed especially in terms of time required to carry out each step, highlighting potential bottlenecks and in view of the national regulation framework, which is rapidly evolving. Different methodologies for the processing of the acquired data will be described and discussed, evaluating the fitness for emergency response applications.

Highlights

An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), commonly known as a drone and referred to as an unpiloted aerial vehicle or a remotely-piloted aircraft (RPA) by the International Civil AviationOrganization (ICAO) is an aircraft without a human pilot aboard [1].As highlighted in Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) [2], UAVs, previously mainly associated with military applications, are increasingly being adopted for civilian uses
In the framework of the DIRECT activities, a UAV deployment exercise was jointly organized with the Regional Civil Protection authority in July 2014 mainly aimed at assessing the effectiveness of the operational procedures in place to deploy UAVs for mapping purposes and the usability of the acquired data in an emergency response context
According to the typical geomatics researcher mind-set, all of the products were compared in order to assess the geometric accuracy, with the final goal to estimate the possible nominal map scale of the orthophoto

Summary

Introduction

An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), commonly known as a drone and referred to as an unpiloted aerial vehicle or a remotely-piloted aircraft (RPA) by the International Civil AviationOrganization (ICAO) is an aircraft without a human pilot aboard [1].As highlighted in Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) [2], UAVs, previously mainly associated with military applications, are increasingly being adopted for civilian uses. An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), commonly known as a drone and referred to as an unpiloted aerial vehicle or a remotely-piloted aircraft (RPA) by the International Civil Aviation. UAVs are exploited in civilian (and commercial) applications, like agriculture, surveying, video making and real estate. Exploiting the decrease of costs related to UAV technology, the humanitarian community started piloting the use of similar systems in humanitarian crises several years ago in different application fields, i.e., disaster mapping and information gathering, community capacity building, logistics and even transportation of goods. Part of the author’s group, composed of researchers in the field of applied geomatics, has been piloting the use of UAVs since 2006 [3], with a specific focus on disaster management applications [4]. The present paper is focused on the exploitation of UAVs in the emergency mapping domain, defined as “creation of maps, geo-information products and spatial analyses dedicated to providing situational awareness emergency management and immediate crisis information for response by means of extraction of reference (pre-event) and crisis (post-event) geographic information/data” [5]

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