1.1.3 The use of UAVs
Although many sensors are currently available on ground, airborne, and
space-based platforms, methods using unmanned aerial vehicles are
rapidly developing among all modern methods for exogenous processes
monitoring (Marzolff & Poesen, 2009; Marzolff et al. , 2011). The
possibility of obtaining three-dimensional (3D) information about the
terrain with high accuracy and spatial resolution opens up new horizons
for studying landslide processes (Gafurov, 2017; Eker et al. ,
2018; Gafurov, 2021). The first studies involving UAV for exogenous
processes monitoring started relatively recently. The authors note the
perspective of photogrammetry technology; however, they conclude that at
that time, DEMs obtained using budget airborne surveys are not accurate
enough to study the rill network, in contrast to DEMs obtained using
ground-based laser systems, which allow a better reconstruction of the
soil surface topography.
Particular attention should be given to methodological and technical
works in which UAVs are compared with other, already proven methods. For
example, when comparing models obtained by TLS and UAV with the results
of total station surveys, in grass vegetation covers, the UAV gives a
model even more accurate than the TLS (GruszczyĆski et al. , 2017;
Gafurov, 2018). When comparing the TLS and UAV models, the errors vary
within 5 mm (Eltner et al. , 2013) from using the ICP method. For
erosion field calibration stand, the average error was 0.03 mm with a
standard deviation of 5 mm (Nouwakpo et al. , 2016; Wilkinsonet al. , 2016).