Dynamic Structural Health Monitoring using a DIC-enabled drone

The structural assessment of infrastructure components, such as bridges and railroad tracks, is crucial for their safe operation. The process is expensive and time-consuming given the large amount of structures that require systematic inspection. Over the last decades, non-contact measurement techniques have been developed that allow remote evaluation of a structure that is accurate and not labor intensive. One of the techniques in this field is Digital Image Correlation (DIC), that has proven to be an accurate method to measure 2D and 3D shape and deformation fields in structures. In current applications, DIC makes use of a stationary stereo vision camera system that is rigidly placed close to the inspected object. In this paper, an autonomous system of a drone equipped with a DIC camera system, that successfully performs remote structural evaluation of a railroad tie, is presented. This development significantly increases the portability of DIC, resulting in faster deployment of DIC/Drone measurement systems that can reach remote locations and perform fast and accurate structural health monitoring.