Drone Inspection for Large-scale Digital Twins: Stationary and Mobile Deployment Concepts

Digital twins are widely used in all areas of human activity. Decision-making, such as instantiating inspection tasks for aerial drones, is one relatively new way to establish an automatic digital-physical connection. Large-scale systems like road systems need a complex inspection approach.In this paper, we discuss two scenarios of utilizing drone hubs for road system inspection: stationary with roadside units and mobile mounted on the truck platform. This topic is not widely discussed in the community. We extended our digital twin of the road system framework to support these two scenario simulations, keeping them highly configurable. The evaluation results showed that these scenarios are well-fit for different use cases, either one-time road state visualization or constant monitoring.For the mobile drone hub scenario, inspecting the whole German road system, which has a total length of 718,000 km, requires several thousands of stationary drone hubs equipped with a three-member drone swarm. At the same time, the stationary drone hub scenario showed that the inspection loop could be performed monthly/bimonthly. Hub candidate locations (queried for this study from all charging station locations in Germany) can cover 89-99% of all roads (depending on service radius).