Low-cost aerial unit for outdoor inspection of building façades

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 façades 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. •UAVs for geometric data acquisition of unreachable areas in buildings•Kinect as a low cost sensor for geometric measurements•Automatic processing methodology for generation of 3D point clouds•Quality assessment of the generated model•Integrated system formed by UAV and Kinect for accurate survey of buildings