Rapid Capture of Topography for Mobility and Situation Awareness

To address the need for rapid capture of terrain profiles, and changes in terrain, researchers from Michigan Tech demonstrated a UAS collection system, during a live exercise, supported by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) Science and Technology Organization (STO). The UAS collection system was deployed to provide high resolution topography (resolution less than 1 cm) with a terrain collection rate greater than 1 meter per second and results were processed within minutes. The resulting topography is of sufficient quality to demonstrate that the technique can be applied to update mobility models, as well as the detection of traverse by ground vehicles.