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PEER Research Project Highlight: “Swarm-Enabled Infrastructure-Mapping for Rapid Damage Assessment Following Earthquakes”

The impact of a PEER funded research project, “Swarm-Enabled Infrastructure-Mapping for Rapid Damage Assessment Following Earthquakes,” is highlighted below. The project Principal Investigator (PI) is Tarek Zohdi, Will C. Hall Family Endowed Chair in Engineering, UC Berkeley. The research team includes Khalid Mosalam, Taisei Professor of Civil Engineering, UC Berkeley and Yuqing Gao, Graduate Student Researcher, UC Berkeley.

Download the Research Project Highlight which includes the abstract. (PDF)

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Different coexisting infrastructures requiring different mapping strategies and path planning

Research Impact:

This study is expected to complement several ongoing PEER projects that are based on developing databases for different infrastructure systems and their earthquake performance. One of these projects is the Seismic Performance Observatory (SPO), which aims at developing a centralized, accessible, extensible and scalable database that provides pre- and post-earthquake data for buildings and various other infrastructures. The proposed swarm-based pre- and post-earthquake mapping of infrastructure will allow the intended extension objectives of the SPO project. This extension can potentially scale up
the SPO database by several orders of magnitude. Currently, this SPO database consists of the information of only few (around 50) structures and the database development is not based on a systematic methodology, but on data uploads by individuals. The proposed project can provide the intended systematic methodology for the development of the SPO database. Moreover, beyond its fundamental objective of providing timely information for emergency responders after earthquakes, the project is expected to provide valuable input for several important infrastructure-related organizations, such as Caltrans for the transportation infrastructure and PG&E for the power grid.