Abstract
Investigation and inspection of damage in road and railway bridges after earthquake disaster are oftenly required to take urgent measures to restore the system at an early stage. Also, in mountainous areas, it is difficult for people to access the long span bridges or its high piers after a disaster. It is also difficult to conduct emergent or routine survey for those parts of bridges. Recently, the visual inspection method using general-purpose Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) is considered as useful for the structural damage detection. In this research, the basic performance for a few type of UAVs were tested by conducting a series of simple flight tests. The inspection performance under wind condition of UAVs were tested by Wind Tunnel tests. A simple wind resistance estimation formula from the wind tunnel test result is proposed. To qualitatively evaluate the performance of UAV for bridge inspection, the Performance Index (PI) for UAV in bridge inspection, considering its Operational, Safety, and Visual-sampling performance, was also proposed. Real bridge inspection verification test using UAV was conducted to examined the effectiveness of this PI.
