Exploring UAVs for structural health monitoring

The preservation and maintenance of architectural heritage on a large scale deserve the design, development, and exploitation of innovative methodologies and tools for sustainable Structural Heritage Monitoring (SHM). In the framework of the Moscardo Project (https://www.moscardo.it/), the role of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in conjunction with a broader IoT platform for SHM has been investigated. UAVs resulted in significant aid for a safe, fast and routinely operated inspection of buildings in synergy with data collected in situ thanks to a network of pervasive wireless sensors (Bacco et al. 2020). The main idea has been to deploy an acquisition layer made of a network of low power sensors capable of collecting environmental parameters and building vibration modes. This layer has been connected to a service layer through gateways capable of performing data analysis and presenting aggregated results thanks to an integrated dashboard. In this architecture, the UAV has emerged as a particular network node for extending the acquisition layer by adding several imaging capabilities.