Autonomous UAVs for Structural Health Monitoring Using Deep Learning and an Ultrasonic Beacon System with Geo-Tagging

Visual inspection has traditionally been used for structural health monitoring. However, assessments conducted by trained inspectors or using contact sensors on structures for monitoring are costly and inefficient because of the number of inspectors and sensors required. To date, data acquisition using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with cameras has become popular, but UAVs require skilled pilots or a global positioning system (GPS) for autonomous flight. Unfortunately, GPS cannot be used by a UAV for autonomous flight near some parts of certain structures (e.g., beneath a bridge), but these are the critical locations that should be inspected to monitor and maintain structural health. To address this difficulty, this article proposes an autonomous UAV method using ultrasonic beacons to replace the role of GPS, a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) for damage detection, and a geo-tagging method for the localization of damage. Concrete cracks, as an example of structural damage, were successfully detected with 97.7% specificity and 91.9% sensitivity, by processing video data collected from an autonomous UAV.