A multi-sensor micro UAV based automatic rapid mapping system for Damage assessment in disaster areas

Damage assessment is an important step toward the restoration of the severely affected areas due to natural disasters or accidents. For more accurate and rapid assessment, one should utilize geospatial data such as ortho-images acquired from the damaged areas. Change detection based on the geospatial data before and after the damage can make possible fast and automatic assessment with a reasonable accuracy. Accordingly, there have been significant demands on a rapid mapping system, which can provide the orthoimages of the damaged areas to the specialists and decision makers in disaster management agencies. In this study, we are developing a UAV based rapid mapping system that can acquire multi-sensory data in the air and generate ortho-images from the data on the ground in a rapid and automatic way. The proposed system consists of two main segments, aerial and ground segments. The aerial segment is to acquire sensory data through autonomous flight over the specified target area. It consists of a micro UAV platform, a mirror-less camera, a GPS, a MEMS IMU, and sensor integration and synchronization module. The ground segment is to receive and process the multi-sensory data to produce orthoimages in rapid and automatic ways. It consists of a computer with appropriate software for flight planning, data reception, georeferencing, and orthoimage generation. In the middle of this on-going project, we will introduce the overview of the project, describe the main components of each segment and provide intermediate results from preliminary test flights.