EVALUATION OF AN UNMANNED AERIAL VEHICLE (UAV) FOR MEASURING AND MONITORING NATURAL DISASTER RISK AREAS

Abstract. This work presents an evaluation of a small UAV-RPAS-PPK to be used in the generation of digital surface models (DSM), without the need for control points, having as main application the monitoring of disaster risk areas (landslide and flooding). The areas to be measured are difficult to access, which prevents or makes access to the land difficult. In this evaluation, a study area of approximately 13 km² was flown over, an average pixel of 11.6 cm and a total of 417 photos. The equipment used to acquire the images was a SenseFly eBee X, equipped with GNSS PPK for Direct Georeferencing (DG) and a camera model S.O.D.A. In all, 42 ground checkpoints were measured using a dual-frequency GNSS receiver. For both the measurement of the checkpoints and for the Direct Georeferencing (DG) base of the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), a relative processing was performed, using the Brazilian Network for Continuous Monitoring (RBMC) as a reference. With this evaluation, it was possible to achieve a result (RMSE) for phototriangulation better than 1.2 pixels for horizontal and 1.5 pixels for vertical, without the need to measure any control points on the ground.