Inspection drones for ensuring safety in transport infrastructures
The Drones4Safety project aims to increase the safety of the European civil transport system by building a cooperative, autonomous, and continuously operating drone system that will be offered to railway and bridge operators to inspect their transportation infrastructure accurately, frequently, and autonomously. The Drones4Safety approach will design energy harvesters to tap energy from the overhead electricity infrastructures of railways and power lines to recharge drones. The project will use satellite and open maps to identify the parts of the transport infrastructure that lays near the electricity infrastructure and feed that information to its drones for scheduling their autonomous missions. The project will develop and improve the state-of-the-art artificial intelligence algorithms to optimize the inspection results onboard of the drone. The project will build a swarm drone system that uses advanced low power long range communication network techniques to inspect different parts of the infrastructure at the same time. Navigation based on advancements in EGNOS/Galileo GNSS will improve accuracy og geo-location of inspection events. The project’s outcomes will be offered to the transportation operators in forms of software services and hardware drone system.
The project brings together leading industrial, research, and academic experts in infrastructure inspection, energy harvesting, artificial intelligence, communications, and drone technology. Two use cases for bridge and railway inspections will be conducted to evaluate the project outcomes.