DEVELOPMENT OF FOUR VISION CAMERA SYSTEM FOR A MICRO-UAV

Abstract. Due to regulations micro-UAV's with a maximum take-off weight of <5kg are commonly bound to applications within the line of sight. An extension of the ground coverage is possible by using a set of oblique cameras. The development of such a multi camera system with a total weight of 1 kg under photogrammetric aspects is quite challenging. The introduced four vision camera system consists of four industrial grade oblique 1.3 mega pixel cameras (four vision) with 9 mm lenses and one nadir looking camera with a 6 mm lens. Despite common consumer grade cameras triggering and image data is stored externally on a small PC with a hard disk of 64 GB and a weight of only 250 g. The key question to be answered in this paper is, how good in a photogrammetric and radiometric sense are the small cameras and do they need an individual calibration treatment or is a single set of calibration parameters sufficient for all cameras?