Road Pavement Inspection with UAVs Beyond Visual Line of Sight in Long-Range Operations

This article describes the aerial platform developed in the framework of the OMICRON project for the improvement and optimisation of road maintenance operations. The aerial platform performs road pavement quality inspection in long-range drone flight scenarios. A customized multi-purpose drone adapted to the payloads used, a high-resolution camera to obtain the digital model of the road with photogrammetry and small, lightweight cameras to Detect And Avoid (DAA) possible threats in the environment while flying in Beyond Visual Line Of Sight (BVLOS) operations have been developed. For photogrammetry, a Sony full-frame camera controlled (triggering and metadata management) with a Raspberry Pi is used. DAA processing is carried out onboard on an Nvidia Jetson Orin NX, using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and transmitting real-time video to the Ground Control Station (GCS).