A low-cost rapid acquisition system of spatial data using an R/C helicopter based multi-sensor system

The demands on Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) based multi-sensor systems have been increasing significantly according to the growth of a variety of applications in disaster, agriculture and military. Most of these systems employ expensive components such as a highly reliable UAV platform and high performance sensors with moderate weight and volume to acquire higher quality of spatial data in a more prompt way. The high cost of such a system, however, may have been the critical obstacle to extend their incorporation into more diverse applications. The purpose of this project is thus to develop a low-cost airborne multi-sensor system that can rapidly generate the spatial data such as geo-referenced image sequences. In this work, we use an R/C (Remote Control) helicopter, instead of the expensive UAV platform, equipped with low-cost multi-sensors such as a small format digital camera and an integrated GPS/MEMS INS sensor. To obtain more stable acquisition, we employ passive vibration relief damper between the platform and sensors instead of an active gimbal system. In addition, we use a low-cost off-theshelf UMPC (Ultra Mobile Personal Computer) to control the sensors and transmit the sensory data through a highspeed mobile wireless communication named "WiBro". Finally, the transmitted sensory data such as image sequences and GPS/INS data are jointly processed to generate georeferenced image sequences in near real-time. By applying the system to a real situation, we measured the performance of the system in terms of accuracy in producing the georeferenced image sequences and the efficiency of processing time.