Real-time terrain draping can be a useful feature for a wide range of applications, including unmanned systems.

One useful feature for any real-time geospatial engine is the capability to drape textures or paint on terrain based on separation from an arbitrary altitude.

Kongsberg Geospatial has added a real-time terrain draping capability to their TerraLens geospatial SDK. This feature allows developers to drape solid colors or textures over terrain in a circle of arbitrary diameter from any specified point, and update that point in real time.

This is useful for applications like displaying altitude proximity warnings for UAS missions in highly conflicted urban airspaces.

For example, in the image above, the IRIS Ground Control Station is being used to conduct a UAS mission in an “urban canyon” in downtown Vancouver, Canada. As the UAS position is updated, the terrain is painted in real time to show all of the obstacles at the UAS altitude (shown in yellow), and above the UAS altitude, (shown in red).

Other applications for terrain draping could include applying real-time still or video imagery to terrain.

TerraLens is an operating system / IDE-agnostic geospatial Software Development Kit that has been optimized for high performance real-time applications. The IRIS UxS Ground Control Station was developed using TerraLens and QT / QML for Windows and Linux.

If you are developing an application requiring a real-time mapping or geospatial component, you can learn more about TerraLens at the link below.