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A PROJECT OVERVIEW FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF A LIGHT AND FLEXIBLE 
RAPID MAPPING SYSTEM FOR EMERGENCY RESPONSE 
Kyoungah Choi a , Impyeong Lee a ’ *, Sung Woong Shin b , Kiseok Ahn c 
a Dept, of Geoinformatics, The University of Seoul, 90 Jeonnong-dong, Dongdaemun-gu, Seoul, Korea - (shale, 
iplee)@uos.ac.kr 
b Telematics -USN Research Division, Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, 161 Gajeong-dong, 
Yuseong-gu, Daejeon, Korea - sshin@etri.re.kr 
c Dept. of Satellite Business, 80-9 Mabook-dong, Gyhung-gu, Yongin-shi, Gyunggi-do, Korea - rcn27@wia.co.kr 
Commission HI, WG IH/3 
KEY WORDS: Rapid Mapping, Emergency Response, Multi-Sensor System, UAV, System Design, Simulation 
ABSTRACT: 
As disasters and accidents due to various natural or artificial causes being increased, the demands for rapid responses for such 
emergency situations also have been ever-increasing. These emergency responses are required to be not only more intelligent and 
systematic but also more customized to the individuals in the site for more effective management of the emergency situations. Such 
requirement can be better fulfilled with the decisions based on the detection of spatial changes acquired rapidly or in real-time from 
the sensors on the air. Such airborne sensory data can be effectively acquired by an UAV based rapid mapping system. This 
presentation introduces an overview of a Korean national project to develop an airborne rapid mapping system. This project is one of 
a series of projects supported through Korean Land Spatialization Group by Korean government. The overall budget is about 6 
million US dollars and the period is about four years. The goal of this project is to develop a light and flexible system to perform 
rapid mapping for emergency responses. This system consists of two main parts, aerial part and ground part. The aerial part includes 
a UAV platform mounted with sensors (GPS/IMU/Camera/Laser Scanner/Thermal IR Camera) and sensor supporting modules for 
sensor integration, data transmission to the ground, data storages and sensor stabilization. The ground part includes three sub 
systems with appropriate software, which are a control/receiving/archiving subsystem, a data geo-referencing subsystem, and a 
spatial information extraction subsystem. As being in an initial stage of this project, we will present an overview of this project, 
including the preliminary design, work breakdown structures, international collaboration, expected products, market status and 
prospect, and others. 
1. INTRODUCTION 
The occurrences and scales of disasters and accidents in the 
modem world have been rapidly increased due to the global 
warming, the terrorist’s attacks, or many other reasons not so 
clearly clarified. The demands for rapid responses for such 
emergency situations have been thus ever-increasing. These 
emergency responses are required to be not only more 
intelligent and systematic but also more customized to the 
individuals in the site for more effective management of the 
emergency situations. Such requirement can be better fulfilled 
with the decisions based on the detection of spatial changes 
acquired rapidly or in real-time from the sensors on the air. 
Such airborne sensory data can be effectively acquired by an 
UAV based rapid mapping system. 
Such a system can be also effectively utilized for military 
applications such as unmanned reconnaissance, observation and 
surveillance, their market being fast growing. For example, the 
European market for UAV-system is expected to be gradually 
expanded, as shown in Figure 1. In addition, the demand for 3D 
spatial information of high quality has been rising as the portal 
services, such as Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth 
providing large scale spatial information of the global areas are 
rapidly growing. Such sophisticated spatial information 
required for generating real-view models of the world can be 
effectively acquired by a UAV based mapping system. 
MS 
Figure 1. Trend of Europe market for UAV-system 
(2006, World UAV Market “Visiongain”) 
Since the World War II, UAV systems have been developed for 
mainly the purposes of reconnaissance and observation (Eck, 
2001). Their applications have been gradually expanded to 
many other fields including photogrammetry and remote 
sensing. 
Corresponding author