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Inspection Drones for Ensuring Safety in Transport Infrastructures

Project description

Drones rise up to challenge of bridge and railway inspections

Drones are being used to perform inspections of roadways and railways. Industrial, research and academic experts in infrastructure inspection, energy harvesting, artificial intelligence, communications, and drone technology are joining forces to help increase the safety of the European civil transport system. Through the EU-funded Drones4Safety project, they are building a cooperative, autonomous, self-recharging and continuously operating drone system for autonomous, accurate and frequent inspections of transport infrastructures. This new system will be made available to railway and bridge operators to remotely monitor the status of their infrastructures and notifying them if a fault is detected. The project will use satellite and open maps, and will develop and improve artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to optimise inspection results. Drones4Safety's outcomes will be presented to transportation operators in the form of software services and hardware drone systems.

Objective

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.

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Topic(s)

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Funding Scheme

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RIA - Research and Innovation action

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Call for proposal

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(opens in new window) H2020-MG-2018-2019-2020

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Coordinator

SYDDANSK UNIVERSITET
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 1 196 605,00
Address
CAMPUSVEJ 55
5230 Odense M
Denmark

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Region
Danmark Syddanmark Fyn
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
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Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 1 196 605,00

Participants (8)

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