UAS-Based LiDAR System for Bulk Pile Volume Measurement

With unmanned aerial system (UAS) technologies’ rapid development in the last couple of decades, UASs have been widely used in different areas, including Architecture, Engineering, and Construction industry. Integrating with a high-resolution camera, LiDAR or other sensing system enables the UAS to conduct complex tasks at construction sites such as pile volume quantification. Understanding pile volume is critical to assist construction scheduling. Traditionally, pile volume measurement is mostly conducted with manual inspection, which is inefficient and expensive. Applying UAS with sensing components onboard provides the possibility of measuring pile volume in a more efficient and affordable approach. In this paper, we introduce a UAS-based pile volume measurement system and conduct experiments measuring the bulk pile volume through a series of field experiments with this system. The volume measurement data collected from the UAS is exported to 3D point cloud processing software for analysis. This software is also used to quantify the bulk volume and record the volume changes over time. The volume measurement results are compared with other records and demonstrate promising accuracy in measuring the pile volume. At last, the performance of the UAS-based pile volume measurement and ongoing investigation to improve the system performance are summarized.