Integration of UAV photogrammetry and kinematic analysis for rock slope stability assessment

Abstract

Rock slope excavation is unpreventable due to some location of infrastructure development must cut through rock hills. Therefore, an appropriate rock slope characterization should be carried out in order to prevent any possible failure. Recent advancement of drone technology has enabled the preliminary assessment on geotechnical characterization to be done in a short period of time. This paper mainly focuses on extraction of orientation and discontinuity features from drone imagery through the application of photogrammetry for rock slope stability assessment. Kinematic analysis is a method used to analyze the various modes of potential rock slope failures such as planar sliding, wedge sliding and flexural toppling that occur due to the presence of unfavorable oriented discontinuities. A drone was used to capture images from aerial and sideways, then imported to photogrammetry software to be processed. The output of the photogrammetry which is the dense cloud point would then be imported into a cloud compare software for the kinematic analysis. The orientations of discontinuities that has been extracted from the rock slope using CloudCompare software was imported into Rocscience Dips Version 7.0 software. The kinematic analysis feature of this software provides a quick check for various rock slope stability failure modes on a stereonet plot, such as planar sliding, wedge sliding and flexural toppling with just input on slope orientation, friction angle and lateral limits, before selecting the failure modes. By using discontinuity data, the kinematic analysis shows that the rock slope has 15.40% risk for planar sliding, 7.16% for wedge sliding and 1.33% for flexural toppling. Hence, the use of UAV as a tool in rock slope characterization is reliable because it can provide valuable preliminary information on rock slope stability assessment.

Quantitative Weathering Assessment of Rock Slope using CIELAB Color Space and Image Analysis Technique

“…The limitation of this study is that the extracted values from CloudCompare has a certain offset of 10° or 10% from the actual reading on-site (Nagendran et al, 2019a;Tung et al, 2018). For instance, the extracted slope face orientations from COMPASS tool CloudCompare for the study area provides 36°/45°, while the manual mapping on-site produces 35°/40° (Table 2).…”

“…The 3D point cloud is transferred as input data to CloudCompare software, allowing the Compass tool to extract geological planes for the assessment of rock mass discontinuities (Dewez et al, 2016;Tung et al, 2018;Villarreal J et al, 2020). The dip and dip direction values generated by the software are compared with manual mapping (scan line survey method) (Nagendran et al, 2019a(Nagendran et al, , 2019bTung et al, 2018). The k-dimensional tree approach and Fast Marching are the two standard practices for extracting discontinuities on CloudCompare (Garcia-Luna et al, 2019).…”

Geotechnical Study of Raspadalica Cliff Rockfall, Croatia

“…After the establishment of the 3D HRPC model described previously, the model was analyzed to identify the main characteristics of the rock mass structure, such as the detection and mapping of the discontinuities and discontinuity sets, orientation and dip of discontinuities, spacing of discontinuities, persistence of discontinuities, and roughness of discontinues, as well as determination of rock block volumes. Due to the increasing use of UAV photogrammetry and the SfM technique to create 3D HRPC models, various automatic and semi-automatic techniques and methods have been developed to detect and map the discontinuities and discontinuity sets [20,[22][23][24][25][26]28,31,, orientation and dip direction of discontinuities [18,20,22,23,26,28,29,31,[37][38][39][40][42][43][44][45]48,49,[54][55][56][57][59][60][61][62][63][64][65][66][67][68][69][70][71][72]…”

GIS-Based Landslide Susceptibility Mapping of the Circum-Baikal Railway in Russia Using UAV Data

“…Due to the use of explosives during construction in already difficult terrain, landslides often occur in this area. Landslides can damage railway tracks and electrical communications, as well as coastal protection structures, which leads to accelerated destruction of the ledge [24]. Damage repair requires significant financial and labour expenses.…”

“…As will be shown below, the use of a heavier three-axis gimbal is highly desirable, since when shooting with tilt cameras, the UAV will always fly one side forward. damage railway tracks and electrical communications, as well as coastal protection structures, which leads to accelerated destruction of the ledge [24]. Damage repair requires significant financial and labour expenses.…”