PROGRAMMA PRIN 2022 - BCALL PRIN2022 D.D. N.104 DEL 2 FEBRUARY 2022
PROJECT TITLE: HORUS – Holistic On-demand Remote Unmanned Sensing
CUP CODE: D53D23003880006
Budget: € 74.489,60
U.R. Coordinator: Striccoli Domenico
Other Research Units or any Sub-Units: Politecnico di Milano, University of Trento
The project HORUS – Holistic On-demand Remote Unmanned Sensing it is intended to redefine the paradigm of Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) for strategic civil infrastructures, introducing a holistic, modular, and on-demand system based on drone swarms and advanced communication and artificial intelligence technologies. The objective is to overcome the limitations of traditional monitoring systems, based on permanent sensors installed on a limited number of structures, evolving toward a scalable and adaptive platform capable of operating in real time on different infrastructures, even in critical environmental conditions or after extreme events. HORUS focuses on the integration of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, 5G/6G communications, cooperative transmission among drones, machine learning algorithms for automatic data analysis, and dynamically updated digital twins. The long-term objective is the massive acquisition of data through sensors carried by drones, their secure and low-latency transmission, and intelligent processing aimed at the automatic detection of damage, real-time assessment of structural reliability, and decision support for the optimal management of infrastructures. In this scenario, HORUS aims to increase the resilience, safety, and economic sustainability of infrastructure management, reducing the costs and time of traditional inspections and improving response capacity in emergency situations.
The results achieved within the HORUS project concerned, in a first phase, the study of recent literature on the Internet of Drones, with particular reference to communication technologies for the exchange of information between drones and ground stations, with particular reference to the standards adopted for drone interoperability, including communication protocols, flight procedures in controlled airspace, and resource management in terms of energy consumption and bandwidth.
In a second phase, a communication framework was implemented for remote monitoring of the structural condition of bridges by means of drones, with particular reference to the bandwidth resources used in the transmission of compressed video over 5G and beyond cellular networks (5G-and-Beyond, 5GB). In this context, an experimental testbed was implemented in which moving drones capture and send compressed video footage using the H.264 and H.265 standards, measuring the bandwidth required to complete the transmission without losses. The results achieved during experiments conducted on the transmission of one minute of real-time video at a resolution of 1280x720 pixels per frame and different frame-rate values (from 15 to 60 frames per second), and using both the H.264 and H.265 compression standards, made it possible to quantify the average bandwidth in the range of 20-30 Mbit/s, rates that can be supported without bandwidth issues only by the latest-generation 5G networks.
