Intel has declared its collaborations with transportation departments to implement bridge inspections using drones. Thus, supplementing manual inspections of the Daniel Carter Beard Bridge by joining together Ohio, Kentucky and the Stone Arch Bridge in Minnesota.
The advanced automated commercial drone hardware and software solutions of intel improved efficiency. It has created good quality data in a fraction of time and cost than traditional methods. The U.S contains more than 600,000 bridges and 10 percent of the bridges have been recently rated as structurally lacking or outdated. Every bridge is uniquely constructed and required orderly inspections to attain safety requirements for common use.
How it Works?
Traditional inspection techniques can be unsafe, expensive and time-consuming. They frequently generate unreliable data. These techniques also block day-to-day traffic patterns with road closures. It depends on manual labour which does not capture accurate data always for proper rehabilitation assessment. This can be prohibitively high-cost to publicly funded sources, and needs many work hours.
The commercial drone solutions helped officials in the entire drone workflow. From flight arrangements and aerial data capture to the cloud-based digital data management, organizing and systematics analysis. In a few situations, this occurred in a 40 percent cost savings over standard inspection methods.
Intel’s collaboration with the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet and the Michael Baker International uses drone technology. In order to inspect and examine the Daniel Carter Beard Bridge, which is an eight-lane interstate that crosses the Ohio River.
The drone seized nearly 2500 high-resolution aerial images, producing 22GB of data which was updated into the Intel Insight Platform. With the help of images, a 3D model or a digital twin of the design was produced to help with analyses and visualization. It can also be applied to observe the paint deterioration and cable firmness of the bridge.
The work concluded in an inspection cost savings of about 40 percent that could protect the taxpayers an approximate of $160,000 over the upcoming 10 years.
Watch a video of Intel introduces bridge inspection drones for Kentucky: