Airborne Unmanned Monitoring System for Coastal Erosion Assessment

Abstract

Large scale and quantitative erosion assessment is one of the most important tools in the development of coastal management policies. In fact, any defense program or resource research planning to be carried out by the Public Administration needs updated knowledge of beach evolution and of the factors influencing this environment. Remote observation techniques have improved greatly during recent years and the availability of high-resolution images now allows systematic monitoring of beach and coastal environment evolution. Shoreline detection needs several digital processing and ancillary data, such as tide values, barometric pressure and wash zone slope. Nowadays data collection can be performed by unmanned aircrafts that can act as collector of different data from a ground layer. In this context hybrid Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) platforms can be used as an effective tool to perform accurate data acquisition. They are easy to deploy, cost effective and able to cover long distances performing different tasks at the same time. In this work, a real test case performed over a Marine Protected Area (MPA), located in the northern coast of Tuscany (Italy), is reported to prove effectiveness and reliability of such technology.