Visual monitoring of civil infrastructure systems via camera-equipped Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs): a review of related works

Reviews camera-equipped UAV monitoring of construction sites and existing infrastructure in three stages: data collection, analytics, and visualization. Collection covers flight planning and autonomy, analytics centres on image-based 3D reconstruction with or without BIM, and visualization covers AR and web point-cloud tools. It notes that practice then relied on skilled pilots and GPS waypoints, and names concrete obstacles to autonomy such as GPS loss and magnetometer problems near steel.

Key findings

• Over a thousand images may be collected per flight on a construction site
• Resulting point clouds can exceed 100 million points
• Processing needs to finish within a few hours to support project control
• GPS-based flight planning ignores site dynamics and suffers from GPS loss and magnetometer issues near steel
• SLAM had rarely been tested on civil infrastructure at the time

Limitations

• Literature up to 2015; autonomy and AI have advanced since
• Tables of applications summarise rather than benchmark methods