Thesis title: Low-cost GNSS Integrated Solution for Structural Health Monitoring
The Italian territory is affected by a high incidence of geological phenomena that compromise the structural health of buildings and infrastructures. Monitoring techniques for these structures are characterised by long operating times, dedicated specialists and very high costs. Such techniques
involve the use of traditional high-precision topographic instruments such as total station or precision levelling, or monitoring techniques such as photogrammetry, laser scanning and SAR. In the monitoring scenario, we are now seeing a strong development of techniques and technologies based on GNSS instrumentation. This project fits this scenario, as a low-cost, continuous monitoring system that increases the self-diagnosis capacity of structures, in line with the Smart Building concept. This system is based on the application of positioning techniques on low-cost instrumentation such as the ZED-F9P module produced by UBLOX. The positioning techniques used are both traditional, established techniques such as Differential Positioning, used in post-processing, and innovative techniques such as GNSS VarioPy, used in real time. In addition to the ZED-F9P module, the EVK-M8T evaluation kit, also produced by UBLOX, was also used during the project to simulate the application of the system to a remotely located receiver. In this case, only the GNSS VarioPy technique was applied. All the results obtained were reported on an easily accessible and readable by users web page developed during the project.