UAS IMAGE-BASED POINT CLOUDS TO 3D BRIM: 3D AS-IS BRIDGE MODEL GENERATION

Abstract

U.S. economic growth, as well as the mobility of people and goods across the country, are largely dependent on the health of the country’s transportation systems. Unfortunately, the U.S. infrastructure is aging and has been poorly maintained for decades. Bridge Information Models (BrIM) are seen as an effective method to improve the efficiency of current bridge inspection and management practices. However, the creation of such a model remains a manual process. Because there are a large number of bridges in the U.S., manually creating BrIMs would be time-consuming, labor-intensive, and expensive. Therefore, a new framework was proposed in this study to speed the creation of BrIMs. The proposed framework was implemented on an existing bridge. The illustrative case study provides a detailed explanation of unmanned aerial system imaging, point cloud generation, and BrIM creation and placement on the basis of the generated point-cloud model. The the case study demonstrated the feasibility of rapidly generating BrIMs using the proposed framework. The proposed framework showed potential to address some of the problems associated with the current BrIM generation process in terms of cost-efficiency and effectiveness.