A uav multi-sensor rapid mapping system for disaster management

As natural and artificial disasters being increased, the demand for rapid responses for emergency situations also has been ever-increasing. These disaster responses require geospatial information of the target areas in real-time or rapidly to manage the situation more effectively. We are in progress of developing a real-time aerial monitoring system based on a UAV to satisfy such requirements. Not only this system can access dangerous areas without interactions with human operators by employing a UAV as a platform but also can rapidly generate geospatial information of the sites through real-time transmission and processing of sensory data. This system consists of two main sectors: aerial sector and ground sector. The aerial sector includes a UAV platform equipped with different types of sensor (GPS/IMU/Camera/Laser Scanner) and sensor supporting modules for sensor integration, data transmission to the ground, data storage, time synchronization, and sensor stabilization. The ground sector includes a control/receiving/archiving subsystem, a data georeferencing subsystem and a spatial information generation subsystem. The development of this system is supported through Korean Land Spatialization Group by Korean government. As part of the four-year project, three years have been progressed. The development and testing of the individual modules and subsystems have been almost completed. Integration of the modules and subsystems is now in progress. In this paper, we will introduce the general concept of our system, including the main features, intermediate results, and expected outcome.