Dynamic BIM-augmented UAV safety inspection for water diversion project

Abstract

As indispensable infrastructure for supplying industrial and residential water, structural failure to water diversion projects will result in unmeasurable loss. Safety inspection is critical for the operation of these projects. Traditional manual inspection is inefficient, has limited coverage, and cannot collaborate the off-site decision-makers with field workers to evaluate the detected abnormal phenomena. In addition, building information modeling (BIM), which is an intuitive and data-driven information platform, has not been integrated with the existing safety inspection procedure for better understanding the detected risk issues. To tackle these drawbacks, a safety inspection method that integrates unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and dynamic BIM is proposed in this paper. An overall workflow for dynamic BIM-augmented UAV safety inspection is developed, which consists of data collection, dynamic BIM construction, and UAV-BIM coupling. A dynamic BIM model is created by aggregating timely-updated safety information with a BIM model in the Web environment. The synchronous navigation of UAV video and dynamic BIM is realized by matching the virtual camera parameters with the real ones. The field experiment implemented in Tianjin, China demonstrates the efficacy of the proposed method, which can not only improve the safety inspection efficiency, but also enable the off-site managers to view the inspection video, and make timely and comprehensive safety evaluation with the support of dynamic BIM. Although the proposed method is introduced from the perspective of water diversion projects, it can also be applied to the inspection of other large-scale infrastructures, e.g. pavements, dams, and railways.