Disaster mitigation

[DM-02] Application of drone to rockfall slope to improve operational efficiency and inspection accuracy

*Daichi Masuda¹, Tetsuya Nakajima², Yusaku Arashida¹, Ryoji Hirata¹, Yohei Sato¹, Hiroshi Hara¹ (1. JR East Consultants Company (Japan), 2. East Japan Railway Company (Japan))

There are areas where rockfall often occur on the slopes along the railway and road in the mountain areas. Until now, safety of slopes has been evaluated mainly by on-site inspection on foot, but there were places where inspection engineers could not easily approach, such as steep escarpment. For such slopes, we had no other choice but to inspection from a long distance visually, and there were limitations to safety evaluations. Therefore, the important problem is to inspect slopes closely.A rockfall occurred on a day midnight, but the location of the occurrence was on a steep cliff that was not visible in close proximity. In this study, we applied a drone to the slope. Accordingly, we inspected the slopes in more detail, and re-extracted areas where falling rocks may occur. In addition, the 3D modeling of the slopes made it possible to visually understand, and drone assisted to evaluated whole range of a rock slope.