Autonomous robotic system for high-efficiency non-destructive bridge deck inspection and evaluation

Bridges are one of the critical civil infrastructure for safety of traveling public. The conditions of bridges deteriorate with time as a result of material aging, excessive loading, and inadequate maintenance, etc. In this paper, the development of an autonomous robotic system is presented for highly-efficient bridge deck inspection and evaluation. An autonomous mobile robot is used as a platform to carry various non-destructive evaluation (NDE) sensing systems for simultaneous and fast data collection. Besides the NDE sensors, the robot is also equipped with various onboard navigation sensors. A sensing integration scheme is presented for high-accuracy robot localization and navigation. The effectiveness of the autonomous robotic NDE system is demonstrated through extensive experiments and field deployments.