106 / 2022-04-22 23:29:14

Evaluation of UAV-based Data Acquisition for Building Damage Inspection

Reinforced concrete structure,Damage inspection,Life cycle management (LCM),Non-destructive Data Acquisition,Trial Testing

Earthquakes occur every day around the world, most of which are only minor shakings without any severe damage. However, great earthquakes occasionally happen and bring significant damage and destruction to our cities on a massive scale, particularly buildings in large cities that play an important role in both human daily life and economic development. Thus, sufficient seismic performance is one of the essential safety and performance requirements for buildings. Once an earthquake occurs, it is necessary to determine which buildings are safe and which are not to protect people from potential secondary injuries, as well as important to provide information for the next-step redhibition strategy. On the other hand, from a long-term perspective of Life cycle management (LCM) to achieve sustainable development, building maintenance and repair to keep existing buildings maintaining sufficient earthquake resistance are also important issues. Based on these considerations, as for the damaged buildings that suffered a destructive earthquake and aged buildings after a long time of usage, damage inspection is essential to evaluate the seismic safety as well as assess the long-term capacity for planning a suitable structural rehabilitation strategy. However, the conventional inspection method by human hands is time-consuming, high expenditure, highly risky for inspectors in the fieldwork, and several other reasons, such as it may need additional instruments such as temporary ladders or scaffolds. To address these problems, an improved inspection approach with higher efficiency and convenience, and less intervention is expected and explored in recent times.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as drones, that have been rapidly developed are noticed and begun to be applied to the damage inspection field due to several advantages. In this present study, such a concept of a damage inspection system based on the development of new technologies with drones has been established. The proposed system intends to use drones to perform a non-destructive data acquisition for purposes of inspection and monitoring the damaged condition of buildings. By sorting, filtering, and processing data using image processing methods, selected high-quality data are consequently analyzed for a further damage evaluation procedure. Presented in this paper are the current requirements, the basic concept and design philosophy, the potential workflow of this new system, and a conceptual comparison with the conventional approach based on a trial experimental test. Also, discussions composing of instructions, recommendations, existing challenges, and future directions to address this approach into practice are suggested.