Abstract
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), known as drones, is an advanced remote sensing technology gaining much interest in the field of civil engineering in the last few years. According to the Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, it is estimated that drones have the potential of reaching an economic benefit of US $82 billion by 2025. This paper investigates novel strategies for the visual inspection assessment and damage detection of bridge condition by maximizing the full potential of UAVs remote technology combined with advanced camera vision methods. The investigation starts by assessing the functionality of modern UAVs and matching the capabilities to the requirements of bridge monitoring. This is important as the driving force behind the technology development of drones has not come from bridge maintenance, but it is important that we exploit the new technologies and the same argument is also true for image processing. The paper explores how these assessment techniques can be transferred on to a UAV platform. The paper not only looks at the important technical issues such as camera stabilization both from flight control and image processing but also the use of UAVs as an inspection and measuring device. The investigation makes use of both laboratory experiments and field trials to assess the effectiveness of the proposed schemes.
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Polydorou, E., Robinson, D., Taylor, S., McGetrick, P. (2021). Health Monitoring of Structures Using Integrated Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). In: Rainieri, C., Fabbrocino, G., Caterino, N., Ceroni, F., Notarangelo, M.A. (eds) Civil Structural Health Monitoring. CSHM 2021. Lecture Notes in Civil Engineering, vol 156. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74258-4_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74258-4_17
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