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arXiv · 2606.20742

A Digital Twin Framework for Traffic-Aware UAV Pavement Monitoring in Open-Traffic Conditions

Yamil Uchani·Grace Luna·Edwin Salcedo·Mauricio Figueroa
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Abstract

UAV-based pavement inspection can reduce the cost and risk of road-surface monitoring, but real-world deployment remains difficult when traffic, pedestrians, and temporary occlusions affect defect visibility. This paper presents a Unity-based digital twin framework for traffic-aware UAV pavement monitoring in open-traffic conditions. The proposed environment integrates procedurally generated road defects, dynamic traffic agents, autonomous UAV navigation, and a multitask YOLOv8n perception module for detecting road defects, pedestrians, and vehicles while classifying road-defect subtypes. After synthetic-domain fine-tuning, the perception model achieved 0.959 mAP@0.5 and 0.940 macro F1-score on a held-out synthetic test set generated from the simulator. The digital twin was then used to evaluate hover-and-recheck, micro-repositioning, and skip-and-revisit recovery strategies across different traffic densities and flight altitudes. Results show that flight altitude strongly affects inspection coverage, while recovery strategies introduce different trade-offs between coverage, mission duration, energy consumption, and revisit behaviour. These findings demonstrate that digital twins can support the development and evaluation of traffic-aware UAV inspection strategies before real-world deployment. The full implementation and trained models are available at https://github.com/EdwinTSalcedo/RDMO-DigitalTwin.

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BibTeXRIS

Yamil Uchani, Grace Luna, Edwin Salcedo, Mauricio Figueroa. 2026-06-17. A Digital Twin Framework for Traffic-Aware UAV Pavement Monitoring in Open-Traffic Conditions. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20742

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