Structural Health Monitoring of a Foot Bridge in Virtual Reality Environment

Aging civil infrastructure systems require imminent attention before any failure mechanism becomes critical. Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) is employed to track inputs and/or responses of structural systems for decision support. Inspections and structural health monitoring require field visits, and subsequently expert assessment of critical elements at site, which may be both time-consuming and costly. Also, fieldwork including visits and inspections may pose danger, require personal protective equipment and structure closures during the fieldwork. To address some of these issues, a Virtual Reality (VR) collaborative application is developed to bring the structure and SHM data from the field to the office such that many experts from different places can simultaneously “virtually visit” the bridge structure for final assessment. In this work, we present a SHM system in a VR environment that includes the technical and visual information necessary for the engineers to make decisions for a footbridge on the campus of the University of Central Florida. In this VR application, for the visualization stage, UAV (Unmanned Air Vehicle) photogrammetry and LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) methods are used to capture the bridge. For the technical assessment stage, Finite Element Analysis (FEA) and Operational Modal Analysis (OMA) from vibration data as part of SHM are analyzed. To better visualize the dynamic response of the structure, the operational behavior from the FEA is reflected on the LiDAR point cloud model for immersive. The multi-user feature allowing teams to collaborate simultaneously is essential for decision-making activities. In conclusion, the proposed VR environment offers the potential to provide beneficial features with further automated and real-time improvements along with the SHM and FEA models.