Developing a UAV-based rapid mapping system for emergency response

As disasters and accidents due to various natural or artificial causes being increased, the demands for rapid responses for emergency situations also have been ever-increasing. These emergency responses need to be not only more intelligent but also more customized to the individual sites to manage the emergency situations more efficiently. More effective counter-measures in such situations will be established only if more accurate and prompt spatial information about the changing areas due to the emergency are available. This information can be rapidly extracted from the airborne sensory data acquired by a UAV-based rapid mapping system. This paper introduces a Korean national project to develop a UAV-based rapid mapping system. The overall budget is about 6 million US dollars and the period is about four years. The goal of this project is to develop a light and flexible system at low cost to perform rapid mapping for emergency responses. This system consists of two main parts, aerial part and ground part. The aerial part includes a small UAV platform equipped with sensors (GPS/IMU/Camera/Laser Scanner) and sensor supporting modules for sensor integration, data transmission to the ground, data storages, time synchronization, and sensor stabilization. The ground part includes three sub-systems with appropriate software, which are a control/receiving/archiving subsystem, a data georeferencing subsystem, and a spatial information generation subsystem. As being in a middle stage of this project, we will present a brief introduction to the overall project and the design of the aerial system with its verification results.