Discovery

Building facades, serving mainly to protect occupants and structural components from natural forces, require periodic inspections for the detection and assessment of building façade anomalies. Over the past years, a growing trend of utilizing camera-equipped drones for periodical building facade inspection has emerged. Building façade anomalies, such as cracks and erosion, can be detected through analyzing drone-captured video, photographs, and infrared images.

The decentralization of infrastructure is critical to long term urban resilience and resource equity. Current centralized models are prone to single point of failure and distribution inefficiencies that lead to waste. Often this wastefulness is exacerbated by mismatches between resource availability and demand at large scales. The proliferation of renewable energy technologies in the past decade has paved the way towards a more diverse and decentralized infrastructure, especially with respect to solar energy.