Designing a vehicle mounted high resolution multi-spectral 3D scanner - Concept design

Abstract

Buildings can improve their energy efficiency through retrofitting and thus decrease energy demand throughout the life of the building. However, evaluating building retrofit opportunities at a city level is a significant challenge. This requires identifying where in the city the biggest energy efficiency gains can be made and in the most cost-effective way. A surveyor is typically relied upon to manually assess a building for insulation absence, defective installation, thermal leakage and other similar issues. To perform these inspections across whole cities would be prohibitively time intensive. There is therefore a need for a faster approach to detect and prioritise a city’s retrofit requirements so that effective value for money decisions can be made. In this paper, the concept design of a vehicle mounted integrated sensing platform to collect high resolution visual, thermal and 3D scene data of the built environment at a city scale is presented. Initial design considerations are first explored before an initial concept design is presented and evaluated. From the evaluation, a number of concerns about the design were raised. Based on these findings, a significantly revised concept design is subsequently presented that addresses the aforementioned issues.