Low-cost aerial unit for outdoor inspection of building facades

Geometry of buildings is an essential measurement during energy inspections, since it has a great influence in the energy performance of the building. Given the difficult access presented to some areas of the buildings that make impossible their complete geometric characterization with terrestrial devices, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) stand as the solution for the acquisition of data both from facades and roofs. In this paper, the potential of UAV to building geometric inspection is analyzed by mounting a Kinect sensor for geometric data acquisition in three-dimensions. The resulting point cloud and 3D model are evaluated in order to validate the performance of the complete system. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.