## 1 Introduction  
Roads must be safe and kept in good condition. Maintenance management is an essential operation that must be carried out effectively to maintain, repair, and rehabilitate roads. Many aspects of life can be affected if large-scale damage occurs in an urban area, which results in not being able to travel [1].  
For the development of maintenance works, it is first necessary to know the pavement conditions, based on correct inspection and monitoring processes of the road [2]. Roughness is one of the most relevant functional indexes and corresponds to irregularities in the pavement surface, affecting service quality. To quantify this factor, the international roughness index (IRI) is used as a statistical indicator of pavement irregularities and presents a unique scale of values for evaluation. There are different equipment and methods to calculate the IRI, which are classified into four classes. The class is related to the accuracy of the measurements; therefore, a class 1 method has higher accuracy, and a class 4 method has a lower accuracy [3].  
The measurements are obtained based on the determination of the longitudinal profile of the road. For this, and as allowed by the four classes, there is different equipment. This is, for example, laser equipment (class 1) that achieves high levels of accuracy in the results; however, it is not widely used due to the high costs of the equipment and its maintenance, the workers' training. On the other hand, standardized manual methods such as the MERLIN equipment (class 3) provide reliable and internationally accepted results, whose execution times are much longer than lasers but with significantly lower costs.  
The massive field of road inspection and maintenance standardly relies on tools and methodologies based on ancient concepts. This is not to say that they provide poor results, but that the modernization of these methodologies is imminent and must be made to meet today's state-of-the-art. The application of new technologies that are beginning to be implemented in the field of infrastructure construction and maintenance, as such, is increasingly noticeable.  
This research seeks to generate new knowledge regarding the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and their direct applicability in road design, management, and maintenance.  
The objective of this research is to reduce working time, human effort, and monetary costs, to be replaced by computational work, which through the technique of photogrammetry and support from 3D model generation software, seeks to install a new concept of work in the field of road inspection and maintenance. Using virtual scenarios, one will seek to obtain the same data or indexes obtained in situ. UAVs were used in conjunction with cameras and GPS for image collection and geo-spatial information. These tools allow us to reduce inspection time in road maintenance and data collection. These data are collected in image format and processed using software based on photogrammetry algorithms, allowing to obtain a virtual reconstruction of the scenario that was captured. The modeled scenario corresponds to a road with a certain resolution that makes it possible to accurately represent the surface of the asphalt layer and apply methods to extract information necessary for the calculation of the IRI.