Autonomous AIrship Equipped by Multi-Sensor Mapping Platform

Abstract. The aim of the project is to create measuring system with specific properties suitable for effective mapping of medium-wide areas (units to tens of square kilometers). The system should be useful especially for ranges that are too large for conventional surveying with GNSS or total station and too small for use of manned air vehicles from economical and accuracy point of view. Accessories of the system will allow e.g. collecting data for urban area modeling, creating thermometric georeferenced maps, mapping of dangerous or inaccessible areas (damps, open-pit mines). For this reason the platform is equipped with laser scanner, VIS camera (one for vertical capturing or more for slope capturing), thermo camera and INS/GPS as an exterior orientation (pose) determination unit. Especially in task of urban modeling the airship, as carrier, have legislative advantages due to prepared restriction for UAV. The resulting absolute accuracy of the developed system should be better than 10 cm (position standard deviation) and the random component is less than 5 cm. This accuracy is lower than for conventional measurements, but significantly higher than the scanning system carried by piloted aircraft. In terms of properties (accuracy, speed of data collection) our system is close to the terrestrial mobile scanning systems, which has disadvantage in the lack of availability in hard to reach locations.