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Spanish UAV manufacturer From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
CATUAV S.L. is a technology-based private company that offers aerial services using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). Its headquarters are located in the Moià airfield in the BCN Drone Center, 40 km north of Barcelona, Spain.[2]
 |
| |
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Unmanned aerial vehicles services |
| Founded | 2007 |
| Founder | Jordi Santacana[1] |
| Headquarters | Moià, Spain |
Key people | Jordi Salvador, Marc Beltran |
| Products | Atmos, Argos, Furos, Stratos |
| Website | www.catuav.com |
CATUAV is a company involved in developing UAV technologies for aerial image acquisition purposes in Europe.[3] The first UAV prototype was built in 2003, as a new business line within Aeroplans Blaus S.L., a company dedicated to experimental and sport aviation equipment.[4] During this period some surveillance UAV systems were developed as part of a strategic agreement with Proytecsa and Indra.[5]
In 2007 the UAV business line had grown enough to create a new company, CATUAV, founded to provide all the services offered with these systems. In 2008 the company signed a strategic agreement with AURENSIS, a Telespazio/Finmeccanica company.[6][7][8] Since then, CATUAV has performed more than 100 commercial missions in the civil market.
Since 2003 CATUAV has developed different technologies in order to perform its services:[9]
CATUAV also operates third-party products that play a role in its activity, such as:
Some services the company offers include:[10][11]
Orthophotos are aerial photographies that have been geometrically corrected such that the scale is uniform, having each pixel an associated geographic coordinate. Orthophotos have the same lack of distortion as maps, so they are an accurate representation of the Earth's surface that can be used to measure distances.
Using photogrammetric software, the aerial images acquired with UAV systems can be rectified and merged in order to create orthorectified image mosaics of the desired extension. The orthophotos have a resolution between 5 cm to 2 m/píxel. In one flight, areas up to 1000 hectares can be detected.
The generation of the orthophotos is made using software that automatically applies photogrammetric principles to rectify the images. As input, it needs georeferenced aerial images and the usage of a calibrated camera. This process leads to submeter precisions in the full orthophoto extension, which can still be increased adding manual control points.
The UAV systems can be equipped with multiple cameras, allowing us the acquisition of images in multiple spectral bands: visible, near infrared, thermal, hyperspectral. Those images can be postprocessed (for example to compute vegetation index) and orthophotos can be generated for each spectral band, resulting in a huge range of applications:
A Digital Elevation Model (DEM) is a continuous 3D representation of a terrain surface area that has been geometrically corrected, so it can be used to measure distances and heights. Two main kinds of DEM can be generated:
CATUAV systems generate a DTM in every flight as a product of the rectification process. From this previous DTM, with more intensive software procedures, a dense Point Cloud 3D model can be generated, from which a high-resolution DSM can be derived.
Obtaining in the same flight an orthophoto plus a DEM, provides a high quality and low-cost product that can be used to support any topography and cartography work. With further processing, dense Point Cloud and DSM can also be obtained, which leads to applications in multiple fields:
If the onboard camera pose has a certain angle from the vertical direction, oblique images are obtained, which allows the obtaining of an aerial perspective of the scene. Thanks to the use of an onboard GPS and inertial system, each image acquired can be automatically georeferenced. The aerial perspective obtained with this kind of images makes it possible to see the scene from a bird's point of view and leads to numerous applications where they are useful:
The systems can be equipped with any desired sensors in order to obtain atmospheric data such as temperature, pressure, CO
2 concentration, etc. This data can be used to perform atmospheric prospection and environmental studies.
CATUAV has been awarded the Galileo Masters European GNSS Agency (GSA) special topic prize and regional prize in 2011 for its TCAS for mini UAV project.[15][16]
Other awards:
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