📡 Data & IoT

Drone-Based 3D Digital Twin

Partnering with geospatial startup Graffiquo as part of the UN's ASEAN Smart Cities Network programme, Cauayan built a drone-based 3D digital twin of the city - described in trade press as the Philippines' first city-scale example. After Typhoon Ulysses flooded the Cagayan river basin in November 2020, its AI-based damage assessment estimated 22 million pesos in crop damage and 550 million pesos in infrastructure damage, and flagged 7,724 families needing evacuation.

Live 📅 since 2020 🤖 Uses AI

🤖 AI-generated summary of the sources below — how this works · 🔎 Last verified 2026-08-02

📡 Data & IoT Digital twin Artificial intelligence

📊 Impact

GovInsider: the digital-twin damage assessment after Typhoon Ulysses estimated 22M pesos in crop damage and 550M pesos in infrastructure damage, and flagged 7,724 families needing evacuation. A separate, earlier account (Frontier Enterprise, 7 May 2021) corroborates the same event at 'nearly PHP 600 million' in total damage and 'over 7000' families needing help.

Scale🏙️ City-wide

📖 Terms in this entry: Digital twin · Adaptive traffic signals

Sources

↗ GovInsider Asia (press)Primary source for the damage figures: '22 million Pesos... worth of crops', 'Infrastructure damages added up to 550 million Pesos', 'identified 7724 families that needed to be evacuated' after Typhoon Ulysses.

↗ Frontier Enterprise (press)Published 7 May 2021; corroborates the same disaster-response event ('the worst flood of the past 40 years') at 'nearly PHP 600 million' in damage and 'over 7000 separate families' helped. States Graffiquo was 'tasked to work with Cauayan City' under the UN's Smart Cities Network ASEAN programme.

↗ Philippine Institute for Development Studies (reference)Policy note surveying Philippine LGU digital-government efforts; background context, not a primary source for this project's figures.

This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed above and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.

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Compare this project

🇲🇱 OpenStreetMap Bamako Decentralized Mapping · Bamako Different tech, same goal: Bamako mapped flood/waste sites by hand; Cauayan built a drone-based 3D twin for typhoon damage assessment. 🇵🇭 Smarter Dengue Early Warning System · Cauayan City Cauayan's other project: this drone-built 3D twin assesses typhoon damage; its dengue trap instead reads mosquito eggs at 99.5% accuracy. 🇨🇳 Qianhai Digital Twin City CIM Platform · Shenzhen Related through Digital twin.

Explore the wider context

🏙️ Urban digital twins compared 🪞 Digital twin guide 🏙️ Cauayan City city profile 📡 Data & IoT projects

📎 Cite this project

1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Drone-Based 3D Digital Twin” — Cauayan City, Philippines. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/cauayan-digital-twin/ (last verified 2026-08-02). Data: CC BY 4.0.

The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.

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