The paper is organized in the first part focused on the description of UAV, their main characteristics, and several best practice suggestion for a correct use, and a second part with a sequence of scenarios where the use of UAV can be considered very useful for engineering geology applications.
In next sections, we will provide a more detailed description of the main characteristics of UAV, their main components, and the possibility to carry on a payload that can be constituted by a system able to acquire a specific dataset-like images, 3D point clouds, or other physical parameters like radiations or air quality. Considering the low price and the very friendly use of the system, these systems are now considered suitable for an incredible number of potential application fields even where the users are not particularly skilled in aeronautics system such as geomatics, geology, cultural heritage, archaeology, survey, mining, environmental applications, and astronomy. Nowadays, UAV and drone are familiar words, and the commercial and smaller version can be found on the shelf, in all electronic shops or in a normal mall with a very low prices. Usually, these systems are employed with imaging sensors but not only. In this paper, we decided to use “UAV” to identify an unmanned aerial system, which is able to have an autonomous flight with or without an engine, to be remotely controlled, and to be able to collect some data. RPAS (remote pilot aircraft system), UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle), and UAS (unmanned aerial system) are the most common acronyms, but we have also to consider all national definition, where the name is translated in the national language. It is possible to find different names or acronyms to describe the same object: an aerial drone. 2017b), to smart farming (Zhang and Kovacs 2012), to the management of natural hazards (Gomez and Purdie 2016 Giordan et al. 2012 Nex and Remondino 2014 Nikolakopoulos et al. The possible field of activity of these systems has progressively expanded and now ranges from archaeological applications (Rinaudo et al. The use of UAV has progressively increased in the last decade and nowadays started to be considered a standard research instrument for the acquisition of images and other information on demand over an area of interest. The work of the Commission is aimed to present a general overview of UAVs and their potentiality in the field of engineering geology. This paper represents the result of the IAEG C35 Commission “Monitoring methods and approaches in engineering geology applications” workgroup.
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