Research Information System
ICAFOF 2017, International Conference on Agriculture, Forest, Food Science and Technologies, Nevşehir, Turkey, 15 - 17 May 2017, vol.1, no.1, pp.983
Determinations of Forest Roads Conditions Using Low Cost Unmanned Aerial Systems
This paper covers investigation of techniques and possibility detect the damages and losses occurring in the constructing process of forest roads by means of low cost unmanned aerial systems. In this study, aerial images were taken by a low cost unmanned rotary wing. Pre-harvest and post-harvest pointclouds and 3D models generating from aerial images were compared and then, the changes were analyzed in terms of dimensions, slope, and cut-and-fill volumes associated with forest skidding roads. To verify the accuracy of the model, cross sections of the road surface were surveyed tachymetrically and compared with the cross sections created in the 3D model in ArcMap. The RMSE of the values of the control points in the 3D model cross sections compared to the values of the points in the tachymetric measurement of the cross sections reached to within 0.0274 m. The results of the tested road section showed that the unmanned aerial systems could be used to detect the forest road surface damage show the difference in accuracy being up to 3 cm compared with the accuracy of the current tachymetric methods.Based on the results, we can conclude that the obtained images from cheap hand held camera placed on unmanned rotary wing process the highest accuracy as well as current measurement techniques. It is also available for multiple analysis in forestry applications. This approach is important in terms of being faster, cheaper, more accessible, innovator compared to Tachymetric, and Terrestrial Lidar measurements. Especially its potential to obtain a three-dimensional surface model with high sensitivity in a faster way brings many advantages.
Keywords: Forestry, low cost unmanned rotary wings, point cloud, forest road, GIS.