Software Tool for Drone Flight Management in Supervising Building Extern Façades

Abstract

In contemporary times, monitoring building façades is a task that require extensive inspections in wide areas of work, working at different heights and in diverse weather situations. To address this challenge, this work proposes the development of a software tool called DroneFaçade to manage the drone flight, generate an image mosaic of a building façade and providing the corresponding report of the inspection mission. This allows continuous monitoring and registering the state of the façade through time. DroneFaçade was developed in four modules namely configuration, execution, data processing and report generation modules. The operational pipeline of DronFaçade includes three phases: first, the configuration module of DroneFaçade is used to introduce the way points, fulfill other information about the mission, trajectory planning and sensors to be used; second, the execution module of DroneFaçade connects to the drone, then the flight mission starts and also the data acquisition; finally, the data processing and report modules of DroneFaçade can compute the mosaic using the image previously stored in a SQL database, and users can generate a PDF report of the mission. Quantitative tests were performed to measure the image mosaic accuracy of DroneFaçade. As a result, the mosaic image computed by DronFaçade has low structural errors, preserves phase congruency and the magnitude of the image gradients, keeps high correlation and an appearance similarity of up 92.6% with respect to the real scene.