Mechatronic Systems Design for an Autonomous Robotic System for High-Efficiency Bridge Deck Inspection and Evaluation

Abstract

The condition of bridges is critical for the safety of the traveling public. Bridges deteriorate with time as a result of material aging, excessive loading, environmental effects, and inadequate maintenance. The current practice of nondestructive evaluation (NDE) of bridge decks cannot meet the increasing demands for highly efficient, cost-effective, and safety-guaranteed inspection and evaluation. In this paper, a mechatronic systems design for an autonomous robotic system for highly efficient bridge deck inspection and evaluation is presented. An autonomous holonomic mobile robot is used as a platform to carry various NDE sensing systems for simultaneous and fast data collection. The robot's NDE sensor suite includes ground penetrating radar arrays, acoustic/seismic arrays, electrical resistivity sensors, and video cameras. Besides the NDE sensors, the robot is also equipped with various onboard navigation sensors such as global positioning system (GPS), inertial measurement units (IMU), laser scanner, etc. An integration scheme is presented to fuse the measurements from the GPS, the IMU and the wheel encoders for high-accuracy robot localization. The performance of the robotic NDE system development is demonstrated through extensive testing experiments and field deployments.

Briefing: UK-RAS white paper in robotics and autonomous systems for resilient infrastructure

“…Balaguer et al, 2002;Bock, 2007;Jahanshahi et al, 2009;Jiang et al, 2005;La et al, 2013;Miller, 2015, 2017;Lee et al, 2012;De Paiva et al, 2006;Peel et al, 2016) with fewer applications of repair due to technology development and, in particular, challenges in robotic object manipulation (e.g. Roth et al, 1998).…”

Visual and Acoustic Data Analysis for the Bridge Deck Inspection Robotic System

“…1. The robot autonomously maneuvers on the bridge based on the advanced localization and navigation algorithm reported in our previous works [8]- [10]. The NDE data collection system is run on two Windows operating computers and communicate with the robot Linux operating computer through the serial communication protocols.…”

“…where (x r , y r , θ r ) are the position and heading of the robot obtained by the Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) [10].…”

“…We have two identical cameras that simultaneously take images of different but overlapping areas of the bridge. Also the robot's estimated position each time a photo is taken is known with the help of onboard sensor fusion based EKF [10].…”

Visual and 3D Mapping for Steel Bridge Inspection Using a Climbing Robot

“…In one hand, R.S Lim et al [3], N. Gucunski et al [4], and H.M. La et al [5] introduce a novel robotic systems for bridge deck inspection, while the NDE technology and NDE data processing for bridge deck inspection and evaluation are presented in [6] and [7]. In [8] and [9], an autonomous robotic system integrated with advanced non-destructive evaluation (NDE) sensors for high-efficiency bridge deck inspection and evaluation. B. Li et al [10] also utilized NDE technique to perform automatic inspection on bridge deck and record bridge's health condition.…”