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The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences. Vol. XXXVII. Part B5. Beijing 2008 
maximum payload is only 20 kg, whereas total weight of a laser 
scanner and GPS/IMU mounted on the platform of high grade 
system is about 11kg. So we don’t mount a laser scanner on the 
medium grade system and we select a MEMS GPS/IMU 
integrated in one. 
Component 
Model 
Important Specification 
UAV 
platform 
Camcopter S-100 
(SCHIEBEL) 
payload : 50kg, 
flight altitude : 1200ft, 
range : 80km, 
endurance : 6 hours 
Laser 
Scanner 
LMS-Q240Ì 
(Riegl) 
weight : 7kg, 
FOV : 80° (±40° ), 
scanning rate : 6~80sps 
Digital 
Camera 
Lw235 
(Lumenera) 
weight : 0.3kg, 
frame rate : 12fps, 
effective pixels : 
1616X1216, 4.4 u m 
GPS 
OEMV-3 
(NOVATEL) 
position accuracy : 1.8m, 
weight : 0.075kg 
data rate : 20Hz 
IMU 
HG1700 
(Honeywell) 
velocity accuracy : 
0.02m/s, 
weight : 3.4kg, 
data Rate : 100Hz 
Table 6. Configuration of high grade system 
Component 
Model 
Important Specification 
UAV 
platform 
NEO S-300 
(SWISS UAV) 
Payload : 20kg 
Digital 
Camera 
Lw235 
(Lumenera) 
weight : 0.3kg, 
frame rate : 12fps, 
effective pixels : 
1616X1216, 4.4 u m 
GPS 
MTi-G 
(X-sens) 
Position accuracy : 
2.0-2.5m, 
Weight : 0.068kg 
GPS Data rate : 4Hz, 
IMU Data rate : 100Hz 
IMU 
Table 7. Configuration of medium grade system 
3.3 Simulation 
To 1) reduce the trials and errors of system design, 2) decrease 
economical cost, 3) set up an optimized process for designing 
multi-sensor system, we simulated an aerial multi-sensor 
system to optimize the aerial system design. The process is 
illustrated in Figure 9. 
Aerial system simulation is comprised of three steps, including 
sensor data preparation, simulation software design, and 
implementation/application of the software. The first one is to 
analyze the data sheets of the digital camera and laser scanner 
preliminarily selected and select key parameter required for the 
simulation. The second one is to design the input and output 
parts of the simulation software. The input includes the 
operation conditions of the platform and the specifications of 
the camera and the laser scanner. Operation conditions are the 
path and velocity of the platform. The specifications of the 
camera are the pixel size, the image size, the focal length, and 
the frame rate. The specification of the laser scanner consists of 
the measurement rate, the scanning rate, the scan angle and the 
data rate. The outputs of this software are the properties of the 
output sensory data, such as the ground coverage, scale, ground 
resolution of each image, the ground coverage, average distance, 
point density of the laser data and so on. 
Figure 9. Simulation process 
Table 8 and 9 show key parameters of the digital camera and 
the laser scanner used for this simulation, respectively. Table 10 
and Table 11 show simulation results about the sensory data 
that the digital camera and laser scanner can produce. 
Considering the target applications, the altitude is set to 800 m 
and the velocity to 100 Km/hour. 
Specification 
Value 
Image Sensor 
1/1.8” "format, 
7.1mm x 5.4mm array 
Effective Pixels 
1616x1216 square pixels, 4.40pm 
Frame Rate 
12 fpsat 1616x1216 
Dynamic Range 
60dB 
Dimensions (W x H x D) 
2.25 x 3.85 x 1.56 inches 
Table 8. Information of simulated image data 
Specification 
Value 
Measurement rate 
10000 Meas./sec 
Scanning rate 
80 scans/sec 
Scan Angle 
±40° 
Data Rate 
4 bytes/mea 
Table 9. Information of simulated laser data