The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is growing rapidly across many civil application domains, including real-time monitoring, providing wireless coverage, remote sensing, search and rescue, delivery of goods, security and surveillance, precision agriculture, and civil infrastructure inspection. Smart UAVs are the next big revolution in the UAV technology promising to provide new opportunities in different applications, especially in civil infrastructure in terms of reduced risks and lower cost. Civil infrastructure is expected to dominate more than $45 Billion market value of UAV usage. In this paper, we present UAV civil applications and their challenges. We also discuss the current research trends and provide future insights for potential UAV uses. Furthermore, we present the key challenges for UAV civil applications, including charging challenges, collision avoidance and swarming challenges, and networking and security-related challenges. Based on our review of the recent literature, we discuss open research challenges and draw high-level insights on how these challenges might be approached.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: A Survey on Civil Applications and Key Research Challenges

Rapid advancement of technology continues to leverage change and innovation in the construction industry. Continued digitization of the industry offers the opportunity to totally reinvent contemporary construction design and delivery practice for future development. Building Information Modelling (BIM) within the context of Architecture, Engineering & Construction (AEC) has been developing since the early 2000s and is considered to be a key technology. Despite major technical advancements in BIM, it has not been fully adopted and its definitive benefits have not been fully capitalized upon by industry stakeholders. The lack of widespread uptake of BIM appears to be linked to the risks and challenges that are potentially impeding its effectiveness. This paper aims to discuss the reality of BIM, its widespread benefits and current level of uptake. The risks and challenges associated with the adoption of BIM, as well as recommendations regarding how future BIM adoption could be developed are also highlighted.

Building Information Modelling (BIM) uptake: Clear benefits, understanding its implementation, risks and challenges

Over the past few years, the application of camera-equipped Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for visually monitoring construction and operation of buildings, bridges, and other types of civil infrastructure systems has exponentially grown. These platforms can frequently survey construction sites, monitor work-in-progress, create documents for safety, and inspect existing structures, particularly for hard-to-reach areas. The purpose of this paper is to provide a concise review of the most recent methods that streamline collection, analysis, visualization, and communication of the visual data captured from these platforms, with and without using Building Information Models (BIM) as a priori information. Specifically, the most relevant works from Civil Engineering, Computer Vision, and Robotics communities are presented and compared in terms of their potential to lead to automatic construction monitoring and civil infrastructure condition assessment.

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Visual monitoring of civil infrastructure systems via camera-equipped Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs): a review of related works

Building Information Modeling (BIM) for green buildings: A critical review and future directions

A literature review of next-generation smart sensing technology in structural health monitoring

Mapping actual thermal properties to building elements in gbXML-based BIM for reliable building energy performance modeling

An automated vision-based method for rapid 3D energy performance modeling of existing buildings using thermal and digital imagery

The benefits of a digital twin city have been assessed based on real-time data collected from preinstalled Internet of Things (IoT) sensors (e.g., traffic, energy use, air pollution, water ...

Participatory Sensing and Digital Twin City: Updating Virtual City Models for Enhanced Risk-Informed Decision-Making

EPAR: Energy Performance Augmented Reality models for identification of building energy performance deviations between actual measurements and simulation results

Youngjib Ham

Papers

Visual monitoring of civil infrastructure systems via camera-equipped Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs): a review of related works

Mapping actual thermal properties to building elements in gbXML-based BIM for reliable building energy performance modeling

An automated vision-based method for rapid 3D energy performance modeling of existing buildings using thermal and digital imagery

Participatory Sensing and Digital Twin City: Updating Virtual City Models for Enhanced Risk-Informed Decision-Making

EPAR: Energy Performance Augmented Reality models for identification of building energy performance deviations between actual measurements and simulation results