Practical Application of Wuhan University AiFlow UAV Visual Flow Measurement System in Flood Emergency Monitoring

Hydrological monitoring of traditional flow measurement equipments are difficult to meet the needs of emergency monitoring, due to terrain and its fixed-point measurement limitations. In this paper, a Wu-han University AirFlow unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) visual flow measurement system was designed by using a UAV equipped with a visual flow meter, which combined advanced video image processing technology and improved space-time image velocimetry (STIV) algorithm to achieve the accurate measurement of flow velocity and flow rate. Using Mairang, Wucha, and Datengxia stations as outdoor experimental sites, the test results show that the Wuhan University AiFlow UAV visual flow measurement sys-tem has an accuracy of more than 90% by compared with the conventional equipment such as acoustic doppler current profiler (ADCP) in hydrological monitoring. In addition, the Wuhan University AiFlow UAV visual flow measurement system shows unique advantages in data collection and video image transmission due to the flexible maneuverability and low-altitude cruising autonomous flight mode, which not only effectively solves the problem of emergency monitoring during floods and reduces the safety risk of manual monitoring during high-flooding periods, but also greatly improves the work efficiency and measurement accuracy.