Drones in the Construction of Bridges and Other Structures

Drones as a means

Drones (mul­ti­copters) can be used to pull the first thin ropes across rivers and canyons, which will then be used to pull strong bridge cables.

Pro­fes­sion­al UAVs are an effec­tive means of ensur­ing the prop­er and safe oper­a­tion of road and rail infra­struc­ture facil­i­ties. With the use of such tech­nolo­gies, the fol­low­ing tasks are solved today:

• Infor­ma­tion sup­port for con­struc­tion and recon­struc­tion of facil­i­ties and bridges
• Inspec­tion and doc­u­men­ta­tion of the state of main gas pipelines, their inter­ac­tion with the envi­ron­ment
• Mon­i­tor­ing of objects and ter­ri­to­ries with increased load
• Cre­ation of var­i­ous car­to­graph­ic mate­ri­als in the inter­ests of the con­struc­tion and oper­a­tion of road and rail­way infra­struc­ture facil­i­ties.

In the inter­ests of solv­ing the above prob­lems, the fol­low­ing basic tech­nolo­gies are used: the study of the lin­ear part of high­ways and bridges based on unmanned sur­vey mate­ri­als, map­ping of major repairs, recon­struc­tion and con­struc­tion objects using unmanned sur­vey data, sur­vey­ing the state along pow­er trans­mis­sion lines using unmanned vehi­cles.

Unmanned patrol of structures

Avi­a­tion unmanned patrolling of bridges and main sec­tions of roads con­sists in mon­i­tor­ing the con­di­tion of routes based on view­ing mate­ri­als obtained using a video cam­era, dig­i­tal cam­era or ther­mal imager installed on a quadro­copter.

Dur­ing unmanned patrolling of bridges and high­ways, the fol­low­ing tasks are solved:

• Iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of sec­tions of the route that are in non-design and / or have lost their sta­ble posi­tion
• Search and detec­tion of dam­age, back­fill­ing of indi­vid­ual sec­tions based on aer­i­al pho­tog­ra­phy
• Col­lec­tion and sys­tem­ati­za­tion of infor­ma­tion about the state of pro­tect­ed zones.

Bridge construction

The pro­duc­tiv­i­ty of work on unmanned aer­i­al pho­tog­ra­phy is up to 200 km per day. In addi­tion, drones can be used not only for sur­vey­ing the ter­rain, but also for build­ing bridges. In par­tic­u­lar, dur­ing the con­struc­tion of bridges, they can be used to pull the first rope ref­er­ence points through ravines or rivers, along which pow­er­ful bridge cables will sub­se­quent­ly go.

The use of drone footage in the con­struc­tion of bridges helps to solve such prob­lems as:

• Con­duct a prompt assess­ment of the cur­rent state of the ter­ri­to­ry and the objects and infra­struc­ture locat­ed on it based on the fac­tu­al dig­i­tal mate­r­i­al of an unmanned robot, dig­i­tal maps and mod­els
• Con­duct a com­par­a­tive analy­sis of changes in the ter­ri­to­ry and land­scape com­po­nents (veg­e­ta­tion, plow­ing, for­est cov­er, etc.)
• Ter­ri­to­ry zon­ing based on mod­ern UAV pho­to­graph­ic data and space images
• Mod­el­ing of pre­dic­tive sit­u­a­tions and devel­op­ment of rec­om­men­da­tions for deci­sion-mak­ing in the field of reduc­ing or over­com­ing the man­i­fes­ta­tion of dan­ger­ous nat­ur­al and anthro­pogenic phe­nom­e­na and process­es.

Cartography

The drone out­put is topo­graph­ic maps of objects and ter­ri­to­ries at a scale from 1:200,000 to 1:2000. To update and refine plans and maps at scales from 1:200000 to 1:2000, pre­vi­ous­ly pub­lished car­to­graph­ic mate­ri­als and up-to-date unmanned sur­vey data for the cur­rent or spec­i­fied date or time peri­od are used.

Based on the analy­sis of car­to­graph­ic mate­ri­als and cur­rent unmanned sur­vey data, changes and addi­tions are made to topo­graph­ic maps. To cre­ate plans for objects and ter­ri­to­ries, as well as the­mat­ic maps based on unmanned sur­vey mate­ri­als, almost all pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary data are used.

You can view the cat­a­log of pro­fes­sion­al UAVs here.