Development and Initial Assessment of a Low Cost Mobile Mapping System

Mobile mapping system have been used in a wide range of applications during the last decades, most of the times with the goal of quickly and quite reliably acquiring georeferenced spatial information of relatively large areas of interest. Indeed, such kind of systems are often preferred to static surveying techniques when dealing with relatively large areas, where static approaches would require very long surveys. Terrestrial mobile mapping systems are composed by a positioning and mapping system, which is typically mounted on a terrestrial vehicle, such as a car. The use of such systems can be limited by (i) possible restrictions on the area of interest, which might be not well suited for the use of such vehicles, and (ii) by their quite high costs, mostly related to the use of expensive sensors in order to ensure high accuracy and reliability of the acquired geospatial information. Despite preserving the quality of the produced information imposes quite stringent restrictions on the used sensors, and consequently on their costs, nowadays the recent technological improvements allowed the development of a number of low cost sensors, which can be used in a mapping system instead of their expensive counterparts. In accordance with such consideration, this paper aims at presenting the development of mobile mapping system with low cost sensors, and an initial evaluation of the performance achievable with such system: indeed, the use of low cost sensors typically reduce the quality of obtained results, or restricts the conditions of usability. To be more specific, this paper presents two versions, one based on stereo vision and the other on mobile laser scanning, of a low cost mobile mapping system recently realized by the University of Padua.