Transportation Communication Tower Inspection Using Novel UAV Technologies
Transportation communication towers facilitate telecommunications that are essential for Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) applications in advancing transportation safety and mobility operations. State DOTs and other agencies spend considerable amount of dollars annually to maintain towers as they are an integral part of their assets. The advancement in unmanned aerial vehicle inspections have propelled its application for assessing the infrastructure condition, especially where traditional monitoring methods are limited by the inaccessibility to hard-to-reach areas. Drone data collection of infrastructure requires many data related tasks such as capture, management, analysis and optimization of data. Big data analytics platforms are efficient in storing, processing, analyzing and visualizing large data sets collected by UAV. Harnessing big data collected from UAVs will provide more insight into assessing current condition, forecast future condition and costs of repair, and provide decision makers with basis to make better informed decisions. The first phase of a multiphase study is proposed here to develop a safe and robust communication tower inspection methodology that involves both the use of UAV and photogrammetry technology as well as data analyses and mining on the aerially collected infrastructure data. During the initial phase, a methodology that involves the collection of aerial tower imagery, processing the images, and analyzing the resulting data using big data analytics tools to make informed decisions pertaining to asset management will be developed. These procedures will be validated with the ground truth measurements and will also compare the benefits of the proposed technology versus traditional methods of manual operations for the same inspection. If successful in the proposed objectives, the study will provide deliverables of a new UAV methodology that will be beneficial to transportation agencies that require proper functioning of towers for ITS operations
Language
- English
Project
- Status: Completed
- Funding: $227,952
-
Contract Numbers:
CTEDD 019-14
69A3551747134
-
Sponsor Organizations:
Center for Transportation Equity, Decisions and Dollars (CTEDD)
University of Texas at Arlington
Arlington, TX United States 76019University of Texas at Arlington
Box 19308
Arlington, TX United States 76019-0308Office of the Assistant Secretary for Research and Technology
University Transportation Centers Program
Department of Transportation
Washington, DC United States 20590 -
Managing Organizations:
Center for Transportation Equity, Decisions and Dollars (CTEDD)
University of Texas at Arlington
Arlington, TX United States 76019University of Texas at Arlington
Box 19308
Arlington, TX United States 76019-0308 -
Performing Organizations:
University of Texas at Arlington
Box 19308
Arlington, TX United States 76019-0308California State Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo
California Polytehcnic State Univeristy
San Luis Obispo, CA United States 93407 -
Principal Investigators:
Pande, Anurag
Alzraiee, Hani
Puppala, Anand
Congress, Surya Sarat Chandra
- Start Date: 20190601
- Expected Completion Date: 20210831
- Actual Completion Date: 0
- USDOT Program: University Transportation Centers
Subject/Index Terms
- TRT Terms: Asset management; Data analysis; Data collection; Drones; Image processing; Inspection equipment; Methodology; Photogrammetry; Telecommunications; Towers; Validation
- Subject Areas: Aviation; Bridges and other structures; Data and Information Technology; Maintenance and Preservation;
Filing Info
- Accession Number: 01710415
- Record Type: Research project
- Source Agency: Center for Transportation Equity, Decisions and Dollars (CTEDD)
- Contract Numbers: CTEDD 019-14, 69A3551747134
- Files: UTC, RIP
- Created Date: Jul 4 2019 11:03AM