Unmanned aerial vehicle for post seismic and other hazard scenarios

On April 6, 2009, an earthquake hits the old city of L’Aquila resulting in hundreds of victims and thousands of collapses. The post emergency and very crucial phase regarding surveys, structure controls and investigations till now is fully underway. Conventional surveying techniques using high precision total stations, GNSS and laser scanners, are instruments of extreme operability but here are still many evident limits on their use especially regarding the survey of both the roofs and the facades of tall buildings or dangerous places, typical in post earthquake situations. Another very important disadvantage of the traditional surveying, especially during the post seismic periods, regards the overall safety of the instruments, operators and workers. In particular, the seismic sequence that may last for months after the main shock, causing collapses and ulterior damage that in most cases can also damage the transport and communication infrastructure creating important problems for all instruments located in that area and definitely posing a further serious risk for all operators. Moreover, some surveys have to be repeated periodically in order to achieve a final result. On the other hand, by using micro UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) for surveying in such particular scenarios, many of these problems can easily bypassed. For example, there are no accessibility problems for an UAV mainly because of its extreme flying capabilities that can really permit the access of virtually any place. Regarding the security, these instruments are fully remotely controlled, so they do not involve any risk for the operators simply because they are in the dangerous area. For these reasons, in this work, we’ll explain the advantages of multirotor UAVs, fully remotely controlled, to acquire roofs and facades of structures in an old city center damaged by a seismic sequence like L’Aquila city.