Preliminary estimates of the viability of UAV-based bridge inspections

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are gaining popularity as sensor platforms for different inspection purposes. Additionally, due to the developments in flight control systems, the effort of learning how to control a UAV is steadily decreasing. This opens up a number of possibilities on how these UAVs can assist in the inspection of civil engineering infrastructure. Furthermore, intelligent flight control algorithms allow for autonomous flight, obstacle avoidance and dynamic flight path calculation and as such increase the possibilities for potential use even more. This paper investigates the boundary conditions of the use of UAVs for bridge inspections in order to give more insight to the infrastructure manager on which conditions in the network advocate the use of UAVs as a beneficial tool for performing inspections. The work is based on an analysis of the viability of using a UAV in visual inspections of three bridges in Switzerland. Based on these investigations a decision flow chart is developed that can be used to help decide whether or not UAVs should be used. The paper is a summary of the work presented in (Romer, 2016).