Infrastructure Condition Assessment Using Drones

Abstract

The condition assessment in pavement is carried out by performing a traditional visual inspection, and by applying the Pavement Condition Index -PCI (Vásquez, 2002). The visual inspection implies to access the roadway and to measure the defects, thus producing interruptions to the traffic flow and/or imposing risks to the technicians. To avoid these interruptions and risks, this research explores the possibility of using drones with high-resolution cameras to gather road condition; then process the images with a GIS linked software and inspect these images to identify and measure the defects. The outcomes of this evaluation were compared to the findings obtained by an independent crew using the traditional method, and the agreement was excellent. These results show that the proposed methodology has a great potential as an alternative pavement assessment process.