UAVs and GIS: An Innovative System for Monitoring Structures

In the last years, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) – systems have become relevant for multiple purposes in different fields of study. The purpose of this work is presenting an innovative experimental system for the assessment of the structural conditions of buildings and infrastructures through continuous monitoring stations based on the use of UAVs. This allows the automation in the monitoring of artifacts that present structural criticalities. The system consists in the acquisition, processing, and selection of images from a group of drones flying from wireless charging stations, whose data are then transmitted to a cloud platform which identifies defects and transmits them to an online Web-GIS platform. This will be the tool for viewing all elements that need maintenance. In addition to the improvement in the automation of data processing and in the precision of their selection, we will analyze an experimental procedure that uses different algorithms for damage detection.