Applanix Offers Single-Board GNSS-Inertial System for UAV Mapping

A pplanix, a mobile mapping and positioning company, has introduced a new product that enables major improvements in unmanned airborne mapping: the Applanix APX-15 UAV GNSS-Inertial System. The announcement was made at InterGeo, being held this week in Berlin

The APX-15 UAV is designed to maximize the efficiency of mapping from small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) by reducing — or even eliminating — Ground Control Points (GCPs). Sidelap is also significantly reduced, increasing the area flown per mission. The Applanix APX-15 UAV provides performance in a small package and, with the included POSPac UAV post-mission software, produces a highly accurate position and orientation solution for direct georeferencing of cameras, LIDARs and other UAS sensors, the company said.

“Applanix has recognized the need to provide the growing UAS mapping market with the same highly efficient solutions that it pioneered for airborne mapping over 15 years ago,” said Joe Hutton, Director of Inertial Technology and Airborne Products at Applanix Corporation. “We are offering a cost-effective solution that meets the size, weight, power and cost requirements of small UAS, and maintains the Applanix pedigree for quality and performance.”

The APX-15 UAV, measuring just 6 cm x 6.7 cm and weighing only 60 grams, features a high-performance, survey-grade, multi-frequency GNSS receiver and low-noise MEMS inertial sensors all on a single board. The Applanix IN-Fusion GNSS-Inertial integration technology runs directly on the GNSS receiver, resulting in an ultra-compact design, while superior performance is achieved from the inertial sensors using the Applanix SmartCal software compensation technology.

APX-15 UAV is expected to be available worldwide in the first quarter of 2015 through the Applanix sales channel.With 220 channels, the APX-15 UAV tracks all available GNSS satellite signals including GPS L1/L2/L2C/L5 and GLONASS L1/L2, QZSS, BeiDou and Galileo, and provides a highly accurate post-mission and real-time RTK GNSS-inertial position and orientation solution to support guidance and control, precision landing and sensor geo-referencing.

@Hugues - not really, no - although of course results will depend on the quality of the imaging sensor deployed. If not using a survey-grade camera that sends its own MEP, it would be necessary to characterize the delays between the trigger signal and the mid-exposure point. If such delay is small, known, and consistent, it can be taken into account in the calculations. One may want to keep a couple of GCPs as a quality control metric, but they are not required for high accuracy mapping. The APX-15 is, fundamentally, a survey-grade solution, and we anticipate that it will mostly be integrated as such into UAS used for survey mapping tasks. The value proposition is derived primarily from the time and cost saving in not having to survey a dense network of GCPs, and also in the ability to fly with much lower sidelap than for traditional AT photogrammetry, increasing the area covered in a single mission by a UAV with limited flight time.

Hope that helps.

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Comments

Martin March 16, 2016 at 5:20am

Sorry, I have not used it myself, too expensive.
Martin March 11, 2016 at 2:15am

The price is over 10 k, but if you look a the accuracy of the IMU and compare it with other products with similar performance you'll find it's not so expensive. Accuracy is always expensive.
Ralph Pendergraph October 19, 2015 at 5:45am

It's Trimble, so expect $$$ and to be proprietary as far as playing well with others. Trimble makes great stuff but that is their current business model and they have priced themselves far away from many small companies.
Pablo Legarreta September 7, 2015 at 9:04am

Any news about the price?
Moderator

Bill Piedra October 15, 2014 at 8:17am

I agree - without a price that thing is just a block of plastic to me. Are they afraid of the price ?
Edward Sellars October 12, 2014 at 2:29pm

I agree regarding price. Looks interesting but where does it fit? $100-$10000? Also would like to see someone use one and their results...
Jerry Giant October 11, 2014 at 2:10am

what's the difference if i ran a swift-nav RTK + Pixhawk, screw you guys, im going home.
Doug Long October 10, 2014 at 10:49am

@Hugues - not really, no - although of course results will depend on the quality of the imaging sensor deployed. If not using a survey-grade camera that sends its own MEP, it would be necessary to characterize the delays between the trigger signal and the mid-exposure point. If such delay is small, known, and consistent, it can be taken into account in the calculations. One may want to keep a couple of GCPs as a quality control metric, but they are not required for high accuracy mapping. The APX-15 is, fundamentally, a survey-grade solution, and we anticipate that it will mostly be integrated as such into UAS used for survey mapping tasks. The value proposition is derived primarily from the time and cost saving in not having to survey a dense network of GCPs, and also in the ability to fly with much lower sidelap than for traditional AT photogrammetry, increasing the area covered in a single mission by a UAV with limited flight time.

Hope that helps.
MR60

Hugues October 10, 2014 at 9:22am

Since there is an inevitable delay between a camera trigger pulse and the actual moment the picture is taken, since in addition, there is another delay between the camera trigger and the applanix trigger registration, the real accuracy cannot be as good as advertised. Therefore ground control points are inevitable to get real centimeter mapping accuracy.
Doug Long October 10, 2014 at 5:53am

@Hugues and @Martin - Yes. APX-15 has an event input to log camera trigger events etc with very high accuracy. Dependent on the camera deployed, this will either be a mid-exposure pulse, or can use the trigger pulse from an autopilot. This provides the data for the post-processing described in my comment to Stephen, above.

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