Advanced Robot System for Automated Bridge Inspection and Monitoring

Abstract

Conventional bridge inspection process is time consuming, hazardous, and may be affected by environmental conditions. It is of great interest, therefore, that an automated and/or teleoperated inspection robot be developed to replace the manual inspection procedure. An advanced robot system for automated bridge inspection and monitoring is developed at the Bridge Inspection Robot Development Interface (BIRDI) at Hanyang University in Korea. The advanced robot inspection system consists of three parts; a modified crane truck with a robotic arm, a robot platform and control system, and a machine vision system for an automatic detection of cracks and other damages. The advanced robot crane truck looks similar to the conventional bucket crane, but is much smaller in size, light-weight and equipped with multi-linkage mechanism of seven degrees-of-freedom with hydraulic actuators. The inspection robot platform consists of rotary joint mechanisms for both pan and tilt motions for the machine vision system and a prismatic (up/down) joint mechanism for the gravitational direction movement. The machine vision system is developed to detect automatically the cracks and other damages on the underside of the bridge deck from the captured images. The developed robot system can allow remote inspection of bridges while reducing human risks and improving efficiency and data reliability, thereby enabling more rational bridge maintenance practice. The advanced robot inspection system is expected to contribute to advancement of infrastructure maintenance technology and enhancement of construction industry competitiveness.