UAV borne real-time road mapping system

Road information is useful in many fields. In this paper, a real-time mapping system is presented to acquire the image and determine the geometry of the road. These include designs of platform and instruments, data transmission, processing and archiving. Compare with the traditional platforms, the UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) platforms offer greater flexibility, shorter response time and is able to generate very high resolution data. It is inexpensive to operate, and its operation is not limited by air traffic constraints. With autonomous flight control system, it is easy to navigate the aircraft along the planned lines strictly. In this system, an unmanned fixed-wing aircraft with double engine and double generator is used, which helps to improve the reliability and capability of the platform. A digital three-axis stabilized platform is developed, which performs an important role in camera attitude controlling. To ensure there is no coverage hole, a data manage system is adopted: after an instantaneous inspection of data integrity, the data will be archived as they are received. If any anomaly is detected, the mission planning will be adapted to re-image the concerned area. Vehicle information extraction from image sequence is also described in this paper. The experiment showed the presented system worked well in real-time road mapping and vehicle information extraction.