  In recent years, unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) are frequently used in many
different applications of photogrammetry such as building damage monitoring,
archaeological mapping and vegetation monitoring. In this paper, a new
state-of-the-art vertical take-off and landing fixed-wing UAS is proposed to
robust photogrammetry missions, called SAMA-VTOL. In this study, the capability
of SAMA-VTOL is investigated for generating orthophoto. The major stages are
including designing, building and experimental scenario. First, a brief
description of design and build is introduced. Next, an experiment was done to
generate accurate orthophoto with minimum ground control points requirements.
The processing step, which includes automatic aerial triangulation with camera
calibration and model generation. In this regard, the Pix4Dmapper software was
used to orientate the images, produce point clouds, creating digital surface
model and generating orthophoto mosaic. Experimental results based on the test
area covering 26.3 hectares indicate that our SAMA-VTOL performs well in the
orthophoto mosaic task.
