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Recently, developments in airborne sensors and easy to fly, reliable, low-cost commercial Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, UAVs, have opened a new era for high quality and reliable mapping from UAVs using remote sensing techniques. The restricted payload capacity of low-cost UAVs imposes constraints on the quality of their navigation systems and the sensors they can carry. Therefore, LIDAR sensors with limited sample rate are utilized within the UAV system. This article introduces several applications that utilizes UAV-LIDAR systems, processing of a sample dataset downloaded from the internet and a new system that is being developed and flown. Our data was collected with DJI S900 Hexacopter and a VLP-16 LIDAR system from Velodyne. We then process the raw data to generate the 3D point cloud. The test site is a farming site so we classified the points into ground points and vegetation points. The results are very promising as an early research investigation. Currently, we are planning for other flights with more rigorous systems and quantitative evaluation.
Elaksher et al. (Wed,) studied this question.