Evaluating the Influence of Wind on UAV Path Planning for Bridge Inspections

Infrastructure inspections using UAVs have surged in recent years thanks to their ability to capture high-resolution imagery in hard-to-reach areas. Their versatility has garnered significant interest in applications such as bridge inspections, offering the potential to substantially reduce both costs and inspection time. However, UAVs are highly sensitive to environmental factors like turbulence and wind gusts, which can com-promise their stability and lead to accidents. This is particularly critical in bridge inspections, where structural components such as pillars, decks, and cables generate complex wind patterns, including vortices and turbulence. To address these challenges, this paper presents a wind assessment methodology for UAV-based bridge inspections. To this end, an automated 3D urban geometry modeling methodology was developed using open-source geospatial data, and wind predictions were calculated via the CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) software Open-FOAM. A practical case study was carried out in Porto, Portugal, to validate the proposed methodology.