A scientometric analysis of drone-based structural health monitoring and new technologies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Critical global challenges, such as climate change and the insufficient availability of resources, mean that it is a pivotal time to make cities more intelligent, efficient, and sustainable in a drive towards a net-zero carbon future. This requires intelligent, interactive, and responsive structural health monitoring (SHM) to assure the longevity and safety of ageing infrastructure. Drones have the potential to revolutionise SHM. Drone-based SHM (as a potential fly-by technique) involves equipping drones with various sensors, or using inbuilt sensors, to capture data and images of structures from different angles and perspectives. The data is then processed and analysed to facilitate accurate assessment of the structure’s health and early diagnosis of damage. Although the use of fly-by is relatively new, the speedy advances in various technologies that could be integrated with it, such as computer vision with artificial intelligence, deep learning, and links to digital twins, put these systems on the verge of a potential breakthrough. This paper provides an overview of fly-by SHM technique using both scientometric and qualitative systematic literature review processes, in order to provide a distinct understanding of the state of the art of research. As an original contribution, our research identified four main clusters of research within the field of fly-by SHM: (1) the application of UAV-enabled vision-based monitoring; (2) the integration of drones, advanced sensor technologies, and artificial intelligence; (3) drone-based SHM integrating modal analysis, energy harvesting, and deep learning; and (4) automation and robotics in drone-based SHM. The paper highlights the integration of new technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and sensors with the fly-by technique for SHM, identifies the gaps in current fly-by SHM research, and suggests new directions for research.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.042 | 0.174 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.147 | 0.185 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".