UAVs-unmanned aerial vehicles-facilitate data acquisition at temporal and spatial scales that still remain unachievable for traditional remote sensing platforms. However, current legal frameworks that regulate UAVs present significant barriers to research and development. To highlight the importance, impact, and diversity of UAV regulations, this paper provides an exploratory investigation of UAV regulations on the global scale. For this, the methodological approach consists of a research synthesis of UAV regulations, including a thorough literature review and a comparative analysis of national regulatory frameworks. Similarities and contrasting elements in the various national UAV regulations are explored including their statuses from the perspectives of past, present, and future trends. Since the early 2000s, countries have gradually established national legal frameworks. Although all UAV regulations have one common goal-minimizing the risks to other airspace users and to both people and property on the ground-the results reveal distinct variations in all the compared variables. Furthermore, besides the clear presence of legal frameworks, market forces such as industry design standards and reliable information about UAVs as public goods are expected to shape future developments.
ABSTRACT:Within the past years, the development of high-quality Inertial Measurement Units (IMU) and GNSS technology and dedicated RTK (Real Time Kinematic) and PPK (Post-Processing Kinematic) solutions for UAVs promise accurate measurements of the exterior orientation (EO) parameters which allow to georeference the images. Whereas the positive impact of known precise GNSS coordinates of camera positions is already well studied, the influence of the angular observations have not been studied in depth so far. Challenges include accuracies of GNSS/IMU observations, excessive angular motion and time synchronization problems during the flight. Thus, this study assesses the final geometric accuracy using direct georeferencing with high-quality post-processed IMU/GNSS and PPK corrections. A comparison of different data processing scenarios including indirect georeferencing, integrated solutions as well as direct georeferencing provides guidance on the workability of UAV mapping approaches that require a high level of positional accuracy. In the current research the results show, that the use of the post-processed APX-15 GNSS and IMU data was particularly beneficial to enhance the image orientation quality. Horizontal accuracies within the pixel level (2.8cm) could be achieved. However, it was also shown, that the angular EO parameters are still too inaccurate to be assigned with a high weight during the image orientation process. Furthermore, detailed investigations of the EO parameters unveil that systematic sensor misalignments and offsets of the image block can be reduced by the introduction of four GCPs. In this regard, the use of PPK corrections reduces the time consuming field work to measure high quantities of GCPs and makes large-scale UAV mapping a more feasible solution for practitioners that require high geometric accuracies.
There exists a demand for effective land administration systems that can support the protection of unrecorded land rights, thereby assisting to reduce poverty and support national development—in alignment with target 1.4 of UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It is estimated that only 30% of the world’s population has documented land rights recorded within a formal land administration system. In response, we developed, adapted, applied, and tested innovative remote sensing methodologies to support land rights mapping, including (1) a unique ontological analysis approach using smart sketch maps (SmartSkeMa); (2) unmanned aerial vehicle application (UAV); and (3) automatic boundary extraction (ABE) techniques, based on the acquired UAV images. To assess the applicability of the remote sensing methodologies several aspects were studied: (1) user needs, (2) the proposed methodologies responses to those needs, and (3) examine broader governance implications related to scaling the suggested approaches. The case location of Kajiado, Kenya is selected. A combination of quantitative and qualitative results resulted from fieldwork and workshops, taking into account both social and technical aspects. The results show that SmartSkeMa was potentially a versatile and community-responsive land data acquisition tool requiring little expertise to be used, UAVs were identified as having a high potential for creating up-to-date base maps able to support the current land administration system, and automatic boundary extraction is an effective method to demarcate physical and visible boundaries compared to traditional methodologies and manual delineation for land tenure mapping activities.
ABSTRACT:In large parts of sub Saharan Africa it remains an ongoing challenging to map millions of unrecognized land rights. Existing approaches for recognizing these rights have proven inappropriate in many cases. A new generation of tools needs to be developed to support faster, cheaper, easier, and more responsible land rights mapping. This is the main goal of its4land, an European Commission Horizon 2020 project that aims to develop innovative tools inspired by the continuum of land rights, fit-for-purpose land administration, and cadastral intelligence. its4land is using strategic collaboration between the EU and East Africa to deliver innovative, scalable, and transferrable ICT solutions. The innovation process incorporates a broad range of stakeholders and emergent geospatial technologies, including smart sketchmaps, UAVs, automated feature extraction, as well as geocloud services. The aim is to combine innovative technologies, capture the specific needs, market opportunities and readiness of end-users in the domain of land tenure information recording in Eastern Africa. The project consists of a four year work plan, €3.9M funding, and eight consortium partners collaborating with stakeholders from six case study locations in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Rwanda. The major tasks include tool development, prototyping, and demonstration for local, national, regional, and international interest groups. The case locations cover different land uses such as: urban, peri-urban, rural smallholder, and (former) pastoralist. This paper describes the project's activities within the first 18 months and covers barriers discovered, lessons learned and results achieved.
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