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Estimation of dump and landfill waste volumes using unmanned aerial systems
Timofey Filkin1, Natalia Sliusar1, Marion Huber-Humer2
1Environmental Protection Department, Perm National Research Polytechnic University, Komsomolskiy Prospect, 29, Perm 614990, Russia.
Abstract:
The paper discusses how the choice of software and hardware components used in unmanned aerial systems (UAS) affects the accuracy of estimating volume on landfills and dumpsites, and the amount of ground work needed to create a high-altitude justification of reference geodetic network. A non-specialized low-cost unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and a specialized UAV of a geodetic class were compared in scenarios with different numbers of ground control points. In addition, the use of desktop and cloud software for photogrammetric data-processing was assessed. Both specialized geodetic and non-specialized low-cost UAVs made it possible to obtain fairly accurate estimates of waste volume. The differences in the UAV results compared to data obtained by ground surveys were about 1.0%, even with a minimum number of ground control points (GCP). With complete abandonment of GCP and processing aerial data in cloud services, these differences increased to 5.0%. Low-cost UAV and cloud services can be used for operational monitoring of waste volume changes at landfills and dumpsites. A geodesic-class UAV allows researchers to build a more accurate digital terrain model of the landfill surface, but it does not give any advantages in waste volume estimation.
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