The Need for Commercialization of UAV for Building Façade Inspection

9 pages•Published: December 11, 2023

Abstract

Thirteen cities in USA are required to follow façade ordinance law for inspecting building façade. Traditionally the approaches to identify building façade defects are contact method with the help of monorail system, temporary suspended working platform and so forth. Visual inspections with contacted method suffer from several challenges and problems including low safety, low productivity, and low reliability. The results of visual inspection can be reliable when dealing with small structures with easily visible parts, but it is not easy for a surveyor to analyze high rise buildings or assess anomalies that are in deeper location without proper means of access and with unfavorable weather conditions. Visible inspection highly depends on the experience of the surveyor alone making the process subjective, human dependent, time consuming and having low accuracy in defect’s measurement in certain situations. It is important to adopt a standard building façade inspection strategy which is fundamental throughout the life cycle analysis of the building. Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) coupled with good quality cameras to capture HD images and videos or infrared cameras and 3D laser scanners to identify damages and cracking in building facades is promising technology which should be commercialized to inspect building facades.

Keyphrases: building facade inspection, facade ordinance law, UAV

In: Tom Leathem, Wesley Collins and Anthony J. Perrenoud (editors). Proceedings of 59th Annual Associated Schools of Construction International Conference, vol 4, pages 578--586

Links:	https://easychair.org/publications/paper/51wZJ
	https://doi.org/10.29007/b2hs