Design And Implementation Of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Ground Station Software For Bridge Disease Detection

With the continuous development of Chinese transportation industry,the traffic pressure borne by bridges is increasingly heavy.Bearing complicated forces for a long time usually leads to cracks,pockmarks and other diseases in the operation process of concrete bridges.If not managed and maintained,the bridge collapse accident will occur.Timely detection and management of bridge diseases can effectively reduce the occurrence of bridge collapse accidents.However,the traditional detection methods of bridge diseases have the disadvantages of low detection accuracy,low efficiency and low safety.In contrast,Unmanned Aerial Vehicle(UAV)detection has the advantages of high flexibility,convenient operation and so on,which has become one of the hot fields of bridge detection research recently.The UAV bridge disease detection ground station is an important part of the UAV bridge detection system,which can control the UAV to reasonably complete the bridge detection task and monitor it in real time.Therefore,combined with image processing technology to achieve the analysis and processing of disease image to get bridge disease information,a newly-developed and newly-designed UAV ground station software for bridge disease detection is introduced in this paper,which can effectively improve the accuracy and speed of disease detection and the information level of bridge detection.The main research work and results are as follows:(1)According to the characteristics of UAV bridge disease detection,the overall structure of UAV bridge disease detection system that is comprised of physical layer,data transmission layer and application layer is designed.Moreover,the UAV ground station software for bridge disease detection is developed,including software hierarchical structure design and software module division.(2)Considering the characteristics of bridge crack disease and pockmarked surface disease,the detection algorithm of bridge disease is designed respectively.Dajin method is employed to segment the image threshold value of bridge crack disease,and morphological method is used to remove the noises such as small holes and burrs after image threshold segmentation.Finally,skeleton processing and curve fitting are carried out to obtain the length,average width and maximum width of the crack.Aiming at detecting the pockmarked surface disease,the mark watershed algorithm is designed to segment the threshold value of the bridge pockmark image,and the area and perimeter of each connected area are obtained by summing them in turn.(3)In order to realize the UAV detection of bridge diseases,the UAV ground station soft-ware for bridge diseases detection system is designed and implemented in accordance with the standard of software development and design in detail.The main functions consist of bridge cracks and pockmarks detection,data communication,software interface,flight status display and command distribution,electronic map and data management.The experiment results show that the software can meet both the expected design requirements the needs of bridge disease detection,and has a good engineering application value as well.