Buildings and Infrastructures

The applications in the Construction and in Public and Private Infrastructures such as electricity and railway lines, road networks, bridges and viaducts, gas pipelines, water networks represent one of the major industrial segments in the drone market.

Drones provide detailed information and high-resolution images, allowing accurate inspections of the structure itself and of its boundaries, for instance monitoring the presence of vegetation or other elements that could impede optimal operation.

Equipped with advanced sensors and without requiring scaffoldings and platforms, UAVs can detect leaks, electrical problems and structure anomalies, acquiring useful data that will be processed by AI modules to identify critical issues. The creation of a Digital Twin of the structure will allow to map exactly where critical points are located.

Regarding bridge inspections in particular, autonomous missions may involve swarms of drones. Because of the presence of GPS-shaded areas under the spans, each drone will communicate with the others and will maintain the contact with one or more “master” drones that have good GPS reception, thus increasing the reliability and the efficiency of inspection missions.

This leads not only to a drastic reduction in execution times but also in a high workers safety: drones can acquire data in dangerous and difficult to reach places, both in case of ordinary infrastructure maintenance and extraordinary inspections after disasters and accidents, mitigating the risk of falls and direct exposures to dangerous agents.

Roads, motorways, bridges, viaducts, railway networks……

The high number and the size of these infrastructures, moreover often dating back decades ago, make it necessary to carry out routine inspections to guarantee their safety: these could be carried out by drones or swarm of drones with greater effectiveness and efficiency, reducing costs, avoiding critical “out of services” and assuring workers safety.