CAREER: Less Obstructive Vital Evaluation-inspection Robots for Bridges

Board Of Regents, Nshe, Obo University Of Nevada, Reno, Reno NV

Investigators

Abstract

Bridges are essential infrastructure components that are critical for the safety of the traveling public and the sustainability of the economy. The more than 600,000 bridges in the United States have an average age of 42 years and have been subjected to varying levels of deterioration due to mechanical wear and weather conditions, inadequate maintenance, and deficiencies in inspection and evaluation. The cost of inspecting, repairing, and replacing deteriorating highway bridges has been estimated at more than $140 billion. Bridge collapses - including the I-5 Skagit River Bridge in Washington state and the I-35W bridge over the Mississippi River, which killed 13 people and injured more than 145 - should serve as strong motivation to ensure that the conditions of bridges are accurately assessed. Non-destructive evaluation (NDE) technologies present a way to identify and predict early-stage bridge deterioration to enable proactive repair and rehabilitation. However, these technologies in their current state cannot meet the increasing demand for efficient, cost-effective, safe bridge inspection because they rely on manual data collection, which is prone to human error, non-comprehensive, slow, labor-intensive and therefore expensive, and negatively impacts traffic flow. More importantly, manual inspection is dangerous for inspectors because they must work in open traffic and climb high bridge structures. In response to these concerns, this project seeks to integrate NDE technologies into a single system that will allow bridges to be inspected by a team of robots. In addition to increasing the safety of human bridge inspectors, reducing traffic delays, and saving money by reducing manual labor, this system will combine the data collected by each individual NDE robot to build a more accurate and reliable assessment of a bridge's condition. The goal of this project is to develop a novel research framework that will integrate NDE technologies with recent advances in robotics and automation sciences. Specifically, the objectives of this project are: (1) to develop a general theoretical framework for multiple NDE sensor fusion and to demonstrate its feasibility to facilitate efficient, accurate, and reliable inspection of highway bridge structures; (2) to develop a control framework to coordinate multiple inspection robots with NDE sensor fusion and with human-in-the-loop for safe, accurate, and efficient bridge inspection while minimizing traffic interruption and labor-intensive operations; and (3) to test and evaluate the framework system both in the lab environment and on real bridges. The long-term research goal of this project is to bring full considerate robot intelligence from theory to real-world applications, such as civil infrastructure inspection, in order to save lives and reduce the costs of inspection and maintenance. This project is jointly funded by the Information and Intelligent Systems (IIS) Division in the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR). This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.