Inspection of Flyover Bridges Using Quadrotor

Historically, bridges earned high importance in trade and commerce, wars and transport. Nowadays bridges consist one the aspects of development of the infrastructure in a country. The main role today of such structures is to interconnect different terrestrial parts. In a fast growing state like the UAE, we see frequently new flyovers are being built. Designed to reduce road traffic, bridges need to be maintained frequently in order to satisfy the need and the implemented cost. Mainly, the periodic maintenance is done by special teams and control centers built near the long or tall bridges. These control centers receive information about the daily status of the bridges such as torques and tensions. Beside this, visual inspection of the construction is also required frequently. This is achieved by specialized team that uses ropes, ladders and other lifting mechanism to reach a defined point. Due to the hidden risk, thousands of catastrophes, deaths and injuries are registered annually caused by ladders and ropes. The aim of this paper is to emphasize on the role of unmanned aerial inspection. The photogrammetry based method is recommended to substitute the inspectors in order to minimize the unnecessary exposure to the risk sources. We suggest to use a quadrotor, a miniature takeoff and landing aerial vehicle, to perform this task to do its high maneuverability and size. on the other hand, we offer to improve the stability of the flight by implementing fuzzy logic position controllers optimized by particle swarm algorithm. The obtained control algorithm is tested in real-time flights by tracking waypoints on low altitude. We pretend that the suggested algorithm will have real impact on the quality of the recorded videos due to improvement in stability