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Development of Drone-Assisted Pavement Profile Mapping: Near-Surface Void Detection Application
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2022-05-01
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Edition:Final Report (August 2020–May 2022)
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Abstract:Monitoring and performance-verification activities of roadway maintenance are labor-intensive tasks and prone to errors. The adoption of unmanned aerial system (UAS) technologies provides an opportunity to improve upon these tasks. This study had the goals of: (1) developing a drone-assisted workflow for pavement maintenance-related tasks, (2) developing and validating algorithms for the assessment of pavement maintenance-related tasks, and (3) performing a test case of a drone-assisted GDOT pavement maintenance task-planning and performance- monitoring process resulting in a prototype of a report of work performance assessment. After performing interviews with GDOT personnel to understand the process of inspecting pavements pre- and post-repairs, a workflow model of the current process was developed. A proposed UAS-integrated workflow was developed afterward and validated with GDOT personnel. Field tests were conducted in which images of pavements were collected at various locations focusing on pre-repair scenarios as well as locations suspected of having subsurface voids present. The collected images were used in the development of algorithms aimed at identifying anomalies in the pavement that could be indicative of the presence of subsurface voids. In the last phase of the project, a prototype reporting method leveraging the ArcGIS platform was developed to provide GDOT personnel with a way to visualize the results of analysis of images collected with UAS. Results showed that RGB (red, green, and blue) and infrared images have the potential to show anomalies in pavements that could not be possible with other inspection methods. Future work to improve the benefits of UAS applications in pavement maintenance could include the collection of additional images to train algorithms to improve the accuracy of results. An evaluation of the implementation of the proposed UAS-integrated workflow in the field and with GDOT personnel can answer questions on the practical implications of UAS use for pavement maintenance tasks.
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[PDF-4.59 MB]
