Application of UAV for Bridge Deck Elevation Profile Analysis

Bridge health monitoring is crucial to traffic safety and requires long-term and comprehensive observation records, such as bridge structural inspection, traffic flow, meteorological data, etc. The deformation measurement of structural inspection is an important key to evaluating the safety of bridge decks. Conventionally, the elevation differences of the bridge deck can be measured through multi-period leveling analysis. However, the investigations rely on manual, labor-intensive on-site measurements, which not only brings safety risks to personnel, but also can only provide results from a few monitoring points and cannot observe the profile elevation of bridge deck.