A Test Field for Mobile Mapping System: design, set up and first test results

Mobile Mapping Systems are one of the most productive apparatus for road survey. Any observable acquired by the sensors that are installed into the vehicle can be located in a map using a navigation system. These observables are acquired in movement and the accuracy of each one can be different from a static survey. Moreover the different work boundary conditions can change the final accuracy of the survey (both for geometric survey and for all the other surveys such as road characterization). In order to give some answer to the above mentioned problems a test field for MMS was designed and realized. This test field is constituted by a track that considers different typology of boundary conditions for the GPS positioning, for different roads typology etc. The field test is, at the moment, fully defined for the positioning aspects. Along a path stable points are identified or materialized, clearly visible on the images acquired by a MMS running the path. The positions of the points are measured by topographic methods with high precision (centimeter level), in an geodetic absolute reference system. The field test has been set up in Bologna (Italy), is about 10 km long and, for the positioning aspects, is fully defined and surveyed. In this work detail regarding the topographic survey are reported and, a comparison between the positions of points obtained by the MMS are compared to the position obtained by topographic approach. All the obtained result has been reported and discussed starting from a statistical point of view