Human activities have severely damaged the natural environment and brought forth worsening natural disasters: frequent heat waves, heavy torrents, forest fires as well as rising sea levels caused by melting glaciers. These devastating disasters have a major impact on living environments and property and even threaten our safety and lives. Unfortunately, past experiences alone are not sufficient for tackling these challenges.
In response to the intensifying environmental issues, governments and non-governmental organizations around the world are actively working together to update and strengthen basic infrastructure. Goal 11 of UN SDGs 2030 - Sustainable cities and communities. It further encourages public and private sector collaborations in this area. Emerging technologies are deployed to improve disaster early warning and response capacity,boosting urban resilience and safeguarding the general public’s quality of life.
Creating Resilient Cities and Rural Areas From Buildings
Buildings - the basic unit of a city – may be a suitable starting point to improve urban resilience. Buildings are the products of the confluence of human culture and nature and building engineering also includes the construction and maintenance of various urban infrastructures. Nowadays, the architectural consultingindustry has gained new perspectives and capabilities with the new drone technology which can deployed to ensure the overall safety of buildings and infrastructure.
Founded in 1984, Liming Engineering Consultants Co. is a full-service engineering consulting company. The firm has been operating in the field of water resource engineering consulting for a substantial period of time and has extensive experience with projects involving steady water supply and hyporheic flow. Liming Engineering Consultants took partin the desilting tunnel projects at Shihmen Reservoir and Zengwen Reservoir which were carried out to extend the reservoir lifespan and reduce the cost of reservoir dredging. In fact, over half of the domestic hyporheic flow projects and water conduit bridge projects are completed by Liming Engineering Consultants.The company frequently participates in runoff distribution and outflow control schemeslaunched by the government. Instead of only depending on water channels, rainfall runoff is properly dispersed between the soil and water channels to raise soil flood tolerance and decrease the risk of flooding in residential areas as well as the loss of life and property during floods.
Introducing Drones to Support Bridge Inspections
Bridges are indispensable in cities as they are important transportation channels. Since bridges fall under the scope of hydraulic engineering, Liming Engineering Consultants also regards bridge inspection as a major working area that requires long-term commitment.
In the past, bridge inspectors had to directly or indirectly look at the deteriorating areas and document the images right there onsite. The images then had to be uploaded to the system. However, some bridges are located in dangerous areas or have very limited space, making them impossible for inspectors to approach.
To tackle this challenge, Liming Engineering Consultants introduced drones into their bridge inspection workflowas human-robot collaboration (HRC) technologies may make bridge inspection tasks less hazardous. However, when drones are deployed to different engineering environments with harsh conditions, they mayencounter issues such as being unable to fly to the bottom of the bridge due to GPS signal blockages or the collected images require a lot of manual processing afterward.
After cooperating with ITRI’s Information and Communications Research Laboratories, Liming Engineering Consultants has solved the aforementioned issues and successfully used drones to inspect bridges over rivers, valleys, and tidal rivers.As of June 2023, the company has completed inspections and verifications at nine cross-river and cross-tidal river bridge sites
Photo 1: Liming Engineering Consultants’Bridge Inspection Team
BuildingResilient Cities and Rural Areas Through Cross-domain Cooperations
ITRI has a long history of working on drone-related technology. The Institute has a wealth of experience in improving drone communications, increasing drone endurance and payload, and AI image detection and analysis applications. Nevertheless, since different drone application scenarios have varied conditions and requirements, cross-domain collaborations are still needed to adapt and enhance the vehicles’ features.
For example, ITRI integrated its drone R&D capabilities with the operators’ bridge inspection experiences to produce drone technology from the user's perspective that is more suitable for the actual application environments.
The drones developed by ITRI have collision avoidance features that let the vehicle fly closer to the bridge. The multi-link transmission technology allows operators to adjust and set data transmission methods based on the connection conditions at inspection sites and build drones with lenses facing upwards for under-bridge inspections. Before the drone is launched, bridge inspection operatorscan plan the route in advance to make operating the drone beneath bridges easier.
In AI image analysis technology, ITRI has completed the AI detection model for common deteriorations found during bridge inspections. The model can identify statuses such as concrete cracks, peeling damage, rebar exposure on concrete bridges, and deterioration patterns like rusting steel plates, bolts, and peeling paint on steel bridges. It helps operators understand the health status of bridges quickly and improve the accuracy of inspection operations.
The introduction of this technology has made it easier to conduct bridge inspections in challenging terrains and has improved the safety and effectiveness of the operations. It also reduces about half of the operation time as well as the cost of renting bridge inspection vehicles and traffic control. Compared with traditional inspection methods, this new technology can reduce 40% of operation costs.
With ITRI’s technology, drones can enter more challenging environments and expand the limitless scope of cross-domain applications. ITRI’s Information and Communications Research Laboratories is actively working with experts in agriculture, fisheries, and other fieldsto develop relevant applications. In addition to building resilient cities and rural areas, we aim to bring forth a more resilient lifestyle that is able to overcome challenges at any time.
