Innovative Tools For Planning, Analysis, and Management of UAV Photogrammetric Surveys

The Unmanned Aerial System (UAV) is widely used in the photogrammetric surveys both for structures and small areas. The geomatics approach, for the several applications where the 3D modeling is required, focuses the attention on the metric quality of the final products of the survey. As widely known, the quality of results derives from the quality of images acquisition phase, which needs an accurate planning phase. Actually, the planning phase is typically managed using dedicated tools, adapted from the traditional aerial-photogrammetric flight plan. Unfortunately, UAV flight has features completely different from the traditional one, hence the use of UAV for photogrammetric applications today requires a growth in the planning knowledge. The basic idea of the present research work is to provide a tool for planning a photogrammetric survey with UAV, called “Unmanned Photogrammetric Office” (U.Ph.O.), that considers the morphology of the object, the effective visibility of its surface, in the respect of the metric precisions. The usual planning tools require the classical parameters of a photogrammetric planning: flight distance from the surface, images overlaps and geometric parameters of the camera. The created “Office suite” U.Ph.O. allows a realistic planning of a photogrammetric survey, requiring additionally an approximate knowledge of the Digital Surface Model (DSM) and the attitude parameters, potentially changing along the route. The planning products will be the realistic overlapping of the images, the Ground Sample Distance (GSD) and the precision on each pixel taking into account the real geometry. The different tested procedures, the solution proposed to estimates the realistic precisions in the particular case of UAV surveys and the obtained results, are described in this thesis work, with an overview on the recently development of UAV surveys and technologies related to them.