Interactive Bridge Inspection Research using Drone

Bridge inspection is a crucial part of maintaining key infrastructures and ensuring public safety. However, the bridge safety inspections require substantial manpower and a variety of equipment, causing issues of high cost, accessibility limitations, and safety risks. To solve these issues, some states have begun to explore the use of rapidly growing drone technology to replace the traditional inspection method. The project teams at Marshall University created a prototype of Interactive Bridge Inspection Research using Drone (iBIRD) as proof of the concept to support the process of bridge inspection using drones. iBIRD consists of (1) a data collection module with a mobile application gathering inspection data using drones and (2) a web framework module of a database-driven Bridge Inspection Management tool. The mobile application in the data collection module is developed using React Native and the web framework of the bridge inspection management system is developed using PHP and MySQL. This paper describes details of the iBIRD system and the drone-assisted bridge inspection process. The results of this study will be of value to federal, state, and local transportation agencies and industry practitioners conducting bridge inspections. Further research will be conducted on improving data security of iBird and an automatic bridge inspection using image processing techniques with machine learning.