uVISION: a new concept for the acquisition, processing and representation of geoinformation

uVISION (pronounced "microvision") was a project to test, validate and demonstrate the concept of airborne mapping from unmanned aerial systems (UAS).

uVISION started as a Brazilian-Spanish cooperation project under the international Iberoeka program that was later jointly funded the Spanish PROFIT program and by the Catalan CIDEM agency. The project involved three research and development centers and five private companies. In uVISION, a prototype system for an unmanned helicopter and its application to Earth Observation and geoinformation acquisition was developed and tested. In the remote-sensing payload, a medium format photographic camera, a tactical-grade inertial measurement unit (IMU) and a dual frequency geodetic-grade GPS receiver were integrated on a small unmanned aircraft (UA) of the helicopter type.

GeoNumerics contributed to uVISION with the GENA SW platform for the simultaneous calibration and orientation of the images acquired in the uVISION test flights. For this purpose, suitable self-calibration and image orientation models were developed and integrated in the airVISION toolbox of GENA.

"UAS mapping" or "UAS photogrammetry" is a new promising field of remote sensing that is attracting the attention of universities and companies.

PROJECT DETAILS

Acronym: uVISION
Title: A new concept for the acquisition, processing and representation of geoinformation
Execution period: 2006 to 2008
Reference:   IBK 06-460 (CYTED); FIT-350100-2006-383, TSI-020100-2008-192 (MICyT); RDITSCON06-1-0037 (CIDEM)
Funding: ES, MICyT; CAT, CIDEM
Coordinating participant: AURENSIS (Barcelona, ES)
Other participants: AIN (Pamplona, ES), GeoVirtual (Barcelona, ES), Institute of Geomatics (Castelldefels, ES)

Status: concluded.