Project Description

Having healthy piers is essential for the Navy to conduct its global operations. In order to maintain piers, inspections are used to help identify existing and potential hazards. By using drone technology and machine learning we can make inspections safer, faster, and cheaper for the Navy and it’s personnel. Current inspection methods are known to be hazardous to inspectors and can take several days and even weeks to complete. One study shows that utilizing an automated UAS can reduce inspection times by up to 90% and reduces pilot training time by up to 50%. Drones have already been used to create digital twins of standing structures, but our project aimed at being able to do this in GPS denied environments. During this project, our team worked on researching various UAS systems, machine learning techniques, and photogrammetry software that best fit design requirements.