A BACKPACK MMS APPLICATION

Abstract

Over the years, MMS systems have demonstrated that accuracies suitable for all but the most demanding cadastral and engineering applications can be achieved. This result, combined with a reduction in both the time and cost of data collection, made MMS a very interesting technology potentially able to meet the demand of GIS operators for rapid spatial data updating. However, the high costs involved in the arrangement of such systems did not favoured their growth in the market, so that MMS are still today mainly operated by the companies or institutions that build them. To allow a wider community of spatial data user to benefit of mobile mapping applications - in particular the lower costs and greater efficiency of data collection – a portable systems, the Backpack MMS, was developed at the University of Calgary MMS in 2001. The research centre of CIRGEO re-implemented such system introducing a few significative changes due to the adoption of different hardware and software solutions with respect to the original project. Then, within a collaborative work with a research team of the Vesuvius Observatory, in summer 2006 this version of the Backpack MMS was tested in a real environment: the goal was to assess the effectiveness of the Backpack as a tool for mapping evacuation routes on areas subjected to natural hazards. In this paper we report a description of our system configuration and the results of performed test along with a few comments on practical issues that affected the final accuracy of mapped routes.