All buildings in Singapore, except for those under 13m in height, need to be inspected at regular intervals in accordance with the Building Control Act.
The purpose of such inspections is to ensure that structural defects due to lack of maintenance can be detected early and rectified. Building inspectors usually have to scale great heights to inspect buildings, with the risk of falling from
such heights a scary possibility. As a result there are not many applicants for this job.
In this project, the team proposes the use of an unmanned aircraft (UA) for building façade inspections, to eliminate the risk of falling from heights. The UA is used to capture data of the facade and automated detection techniques
will be implemented to analyse the data using computer vision technologies.
The use of 5G technology has also been tested in this project. With 5G, there is low latency in the data transmission and detection can be done off-line, where computing resources are readily available. To further reduce the error of missing
out on defects due to human factors, the team implemented audio alerts to alert the operator when a potential defect is detected during analysis.