DEMONSTRATION EXPERIMENT ON BRIDGE INSPECTION UTILIZING UAV AUTONOMOUS CONTROL

Abstract

Inspection of infrastructure is regarded as the most important issue in order to safely maintain and manage infrastructure facilities including aging bridges. However, the number of engineers who can inspect bridges is currently under serious labor shortage. While efficient maintenance of bridges is an issue, small unmanned aerial vehicles, commonly known as UAVs, are attracting attention. It is thought that the stability of operation mentioned in the problem of bridge inspection using UAV can be improved by using autonomous flight UAV. In this study, flight test and thrust test were performed to evaluate the performance of a general-purpose UAV in bridge inspection. In addition, Waypoints were created using a smartphone application. Using a general-purpose UAV that had a high Performance evaluation value in bridge inspection, an actual bridge inspection by an autonomous flight UAV was performed. 2D models of the inspection bridge were created to automatically detect damage from the video taken during the actual bridge inspection. Finally, as a future perspective, the necessary items for a complete UAV autonomous flight inspection of the bridge were proposed.