Accuracy Aspects of an Unpiloted Aerial Vehicle Equipped with a Survey Grade Laser Scanner

Abstract

Unmanned/Unpiloted aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with laser scanners have been widely used for various purposes, such as in construction sites, agriculture, forestry, and disaster management, as they can obtain high density point clouds with millimeter to centimeter scale accuracy. Recently, low and high performance products that use direct georeferencing devices integrated with laser scanners, or laser scanners with Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) techniques have been available. Moreover, there have been numerous reports regarding the various applications of UAVs equipped with laser scanners ; however, most of these reports only discuss the results using UAVs as measuring devices. Therefore, to understand the functioning of UAVs equipped with laser scanners, we investigated the accuracy aspects of the survey grade laser scanner unit from the viewpoint of photogrammetry. We evaluated the performance of the point clouds with reflection intensities acquired by Applanix AP40 GNSS/IMU and RIEGL VUX-1HA laser scanner at a UAV test site provided by JSPRS. We present the theoretical values obtained using the observation equations and results of the accuracy aspects of the acquired data.