BIM-supported drone path planning for building exterior surface inspection

Digitalization in the architectural, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry highlights the interdisciplinary collaboration between complex systems to provide fast and efficient services. This paper incorporates Building Information Modeling (BIM) and drone, and generates feasible paths for exterior building surface inspections. A systematic approach was proposed, focusing on the overall automatic procedure from the BIM model to the actual flight of the drone in a real-world building environment. The proposed method comprises five main steps: BIM to point cloud represented surface model generation, viewpoint determination, path planning, virtual simulation, and actual flight. In particular, the basic function could generate an inspection path for the whole building that guarantees high coverage rates, obstacle avoidance, and collision-free operation. The advanced function provides four types of building-specific decomposition strategies capable of overcoming the complex building structure shape, enabling reasonable inspection ranges, and enhancing computation efficiency. To simulate a drone's inspection procedure and evaluate its performance in various contexts, an integrated platform based on a game engine and Airsim was developed. In addition, a case study was conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the method. The results demonstrate that the proposed BIM-enabled path planning can assist drones in conducting building inspection tasks with considerable applicability and flexibility.