| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立中央大學 === 營建管理研究所 === 103 === There are twenty eight thousands of bridges in Taiwan which are mainly inspected visually with hand-held devices. Recently, popular unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) have been used in many places such as elevated shooting of images for disastrous areas. However, UAV with automated route-flying capabilities have not yet been used in bridge inspection. Thus, this research explores the feasibility using such UAV equipped with cameras in dangerous or hard to reach areas where bridges are located, and compares the quality differences of photos that are taken by inspectors.
This research firstly obtained relevant knowledge regarding current status of UAV through literature review and expert interviews. A few UAV were then assembled using various commercially available parts or hardware to test their abilities in automated route-flying for bridge inspection. The automated route-fly capabilities of UAV were specially programmed using available computer codes accompanied with the hardware. It is found that such UAV are suitable for inexperienced bridge inspectors to obtain images of bridge components with many advantages; better or no less than that of traditional inspection, in time, labor, cost, and safety aspects. The only deficiency is that the UAV only can capture 19 out of 21 bridge components. Notably, using such UAV for bridge inspection should avoid bridges wider than 60 meters, piers shorter than 5 meters, or 100 meters above or 20 meters below the bridge to maintain normal operation of the UAV.
Based on the aforementioned criteria, there are 4,807 bridges in the Taiwan Bridge Management System (TBMS) that are suitable for using such automated UAV for bridge inspection. Results of this research can serve as useful references for bridge management agencies in Taiwan in planning bridge inspection tasks so as to improve the quality of bridge inspection.
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