Review of Non-Destructive Civil Infrastructure Evaluation for Bridges: State-of-the-Art Robotic Platforms, Sensors and Algorithms

Abstract

The non-destructive evaluation (NDE) of civil infrastructure has been an active area of research in recent decades. The traditional inspection of civil infrastructure mostly relies on visual inspection using human inspectors. To facilitate this process, different sensors for data collection and techniques for data analyses have been used to effectively carry out this task in an automated fashion. This review-based study will examine some of the recent developments in the field of autonomous robotic platforms for NDE and the structural health monitoring (SHM) of bridges. Some of the salient features of this review-based study will be discussed in the light of the existing surveys and reviews that have been published in the recent past, which will enable the clarification regarding the novelty of the present review-based study. The review methodology will be discussed in sufficient depth, which will provide insights regarding some of the primary aspects of the review methodology followed by this review-based study. In order to provide an in-depth examination of the state-of-the-art, the current research will examine the three major research streams. The first stream relates to technological robotic platforms developed for NDE of bridges. The second stream of literature examines myriad sensors used for the development of robotic platforms for the NDE of bridges. The third stream of literature highlights different algorithms for the surface- and sub-surface-level analysis of bridges that have been developed by studies in the past. A number of challenges towards the development of robotic platforms have also been discussed.

Fusion and Visualization of Bridge Deck Nondestructive Evaluation Data via Machine Learning

“…Overall, eight NDE techniques were used to collect synchronous data from the specimens. Four of these NDE measurements simulate measurements from the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) Robotics-Assisted Bridge Inspection Tool (RABIT), a robot designed to perform synchronous multi-NDE assessments of bridge decks (Gucunski et al, 2017;La et al, 2017;Gibb et al, 2018;Ahmed et al, 2020). The other four are commonly used techniques for bridge deck NDE.…”

Health Monitoring of Large-Scale Civil Structures: An Approach Based on Data Partitioning and Classical Multidimensional Scaling

“…In recent times, structural health monitoring (SHM) has become a key tool to assess the integrity and health of such structures. Vibration-based SHM methodologies are reliable approaches to monitor the dynamic characteristics of the systems and detect structural damage [ 1 , 2 , 3 ]. Generally speaking, there are two possible approaches to the SHM problem: model-based, and data-driven methods.…”

Fast Falling Weight Deflectometer Method for Condition Assessment of RC Bridges

“…Several strategies are available to determine the structural conditions and mechanical performances of bridges and viaducts. An interesting review of a method of damage assessment is presented in References [8][9][10][11], in which the possibility to derive a structural condition index throughout the displacement and strain monitoring is investigated. At this purpose, the most effective approach is to perform a continuum investigation of the infrastructure during its life span [12], from the construction through the life cycle.…”