A GIS application for UAV flight planning

The flight planning for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is extremely useful both in terms of planimetry and altimetry. Regarding the planimetry, it is needed to reach and operate on the region of interest, while for the altimetry, it is functional to plan the flight altitude as function of the obstacles along the navigation path. In this paper we propose an innovative approach for the construction of a georeferenced map of the obstacles based on Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technologies. In this way the path planning for the UAV navigation can be accurately managed by defining precise flight plans on a cartographic support where the obstacles are represented in a three-dimensional way. The employment of free and open source software only, makes the approach widely usable and customizable.