RIEGL's BathyCopter is a sUAV-based surveying system for hydrographic applications ideally suited for generating profiles of inland water bodies.

The roboust and reliable platform design of RIEGL's remotely piloted RiCOPTER now integrates the new RIEGL BDF-1, a compact and lightweight bathymetric depth finder comprising of tilt compensator, an IMU/GNSS unit with antenna, a control unit and up to two external digital cameras. The BDF-1 can optionally be equipped with a miniVUX-1UAV LiDAR sensor.

The device sends out laser pulses at a rate of 4 kHz. The echo signal of each laser pulse is digitized and recorded for the entire range gate of 50m. That means, that predetection averaging of the waveforms can be performed in post processing, increasing the depth performance.

Subsequently the waveforms are processed by RIEGL's new and patented hydrographic full waveform processing algorithm based on exponential decomposition. Finally data sets with high accuracy, high range resolution, and hydrography-specific attributes are provided which support point classification.