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2021 - DroneFacade, Flight Management Software Tool to Supervise Building Externals Facades using a Drone
Performing the facade monitoring process of a building on a regular basis allows the development and implementation of preventive maintenance at points of interest on the façade, preserving its condition and prolonging its useful life. Monitoring tasks are also especially useful when the façade and the structure in general have been exposed to external factors that can generate considerable effects, natural disasters, for example, situations under which the monitoring task allows to evaluate the safety of the building. and deploy timely repair and maintenance actions to preserve its integrity. Both cases present one of the greatest challenges, since the monitoring of building facades can be tedious due to the large size of these surfaces.
DroneFacade allows the generation of the flight mission from waypoints for the construction of a vertical type trajectory necessary for the acquisition of data from the facade. In addition, the application allows the control of the UAV during the execution of the trajectory, a module for the stage of image processing and generation of the mosaic, as well as a module for the administration and generation of reports with the information of missions contained in the application database.
Actually, DroneFacade is a registered software legally recognized by the Interior Ministry of Colombia. This document can be downloaded here.
At the very beginning, DroneFacade requires a login procedure to users. This is shown in the image at the left, this GUI shows the following functionalities:
Login and password are requested when users starts a new mission.
Login and password are requested when users want to view results of previous missions.
A vertical navigation bar at the left to configure, execute, process and build reports.
Showing the user manual.
Icons of the producers.
Then, the following module is configuration. Here, DroneFacade shows the GUI observed at the right, where the following functionalities are available:
User can select the state and city where the mission is taking place.
User must fulfill the following data:
Mission name.
Operator name.
Email.
Building facade name.
Description.
Intrinsic calibration parameters of the camera.
Imported waypoints in NEMA format.
Visualization of the waypoints
Trajectory generation
Afterwards, once the configuration is done, DroneFacade connects with the on-board flight controller to upload the trajectory waypoints; then, DroneFacade shows the GUI observed at the left, where users can perform the following tasks:
Observing the status of the mission.
Observing information such as:
Time of flight
Presence of GPS and IMU data
Drone telemetry
Camera snapshots.
Control buttons for:
Starting the mission
Pausing the mission.
Stopping the mission
Visualizing the drone trajectory
Console messages.
Later, when the mission finishes, DroneFacade shows a GUI as observed in the right where the following functionalities are available:
Users can select the destination folder where images will be downloaded.
Status information about the download process such as:
Image indexes.
Image size
Miniature representation
Navigation tools to go forwards or backwards.
Specifying the parameters of building the facade mosaic.
Observing the resulting mosaic
Zooming in on the mosaic.
Exporting the mosaic image.
Finally, DroneFacade shows the report building GUI which is observed in the left figure where users can perform the following tasks:
Search missions to report by:
State
City
Mission name
User name
Updating data to include in the report such as:
Mission data
Calibration data
Trajectory data
Mosaic image computed
Building the report
This software was developed for industrial service and academic use. If you like to perform a field test, please contact me:
Prof. Bladimir Bacca Cortes Ph.D.
Address: Cra. 100, Street 13, Universidad del Valle, Melendez, Building 354, Office 2006.
Tel: +5723212100 Ext. 7656
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