The year is almost over, and we are pleased to celebrate a wonderful closing event for the AI Developer Work Group.
Many German bridges were built as far back as the 1970s and are now approaching the end of their service life. Detailed inspections are essential for their maintenance, but they are time-consuming and expensive. In an interdisciplinary collaborative project, the departments of ‘Computer Science in Civil Engineering’, ‘Control Engineering’ and ‘Artificial Intelligence and Formal Methods’ at Ruhr University are attempting to solve this problem and tackle the increasing inspection workload using state-of-the-art technology.
Drones fly over the bridges with centimetre-level precision, mapping them using lightweight cameras whilst simultaneously analysing the image data on an on-board chip to identify any damage immediately. The requirements for the AI models used are stringent: they must run efficiently on airborne hardware and be precisely calibrated to provide reliable uncertainty estimates.
Dr Marcel Neuhausen explained how this can be achieved in his fascinating talk on 1 December 2025, entitled ‘Towards Automated Support for Bridge Inspections: Uncertainty-Aware Mapping of Damages’. We would like to extend our warmest thanks to our speaker and the participants of the work group for the lively discussion that followed!
The organizing team of the AI Developer Work Group wishes you happy holidays and looks forward to an exciting 2026 with many more engaging topics!
