Evaluation of Horizontal and Vertical Positions Obtained from an Unmanned Aircraft Vehicle Applied to Large Scale Cartography of Infrastructure Loss Due to the Earthquake of April 2016 in Ecuador

The development technology of Unmanned Aircraft Vehicles (UAV) allows the improvement of new applications and it may be used to obtain geo-spatial information with high precision. In this study we present the evaluation of an ortho-mosaic and a digital surface model (DSM), which both have been generated from information received by UAV flights. The horizontal control points were obtained by precision positioning with GPS and they were referred at SIRGAS system, epoch 2014.0. The vertical points were obtained by spirit leveling referred at vertical datum “La Libertad” in Ecuador. These results indicate that it is possible to realize cartography scales 1:500 scales, and digital elevation model a 1:500 scales with contour line of 1 m. Such high resolution of the UAV has been used to evaluate the damage provoked by the 7.8 Mw earthquake, which occurred at the 16th of April 2016 in the coastal part of Ecuador. The quick application of the UAV and the generation of such images and data obtained, supported the rescue teams in the recovery of victims and helped to improve a fast evaluation and quantification of the collapses of the infrastructure.