A Field Deployable Wall-Climbing Robot for Bridge Inspection Using Vision and Impact Sounding Techniques

This Year-2 project will investigate the performance of impact echo methods that uses piezoelectric transducers to detect deep delamination and other types of subsurface flaws. It is expected that the impact echo will not be severely affected by air-wave noise, shall be able to detect and measure the depth of delamination, can be used on concrete floors with asphalt overlays. This project will integrate both impact echo and impact sounding devices in the Impact-Rover and evaluate its performance on concrete slabs. The combination of robotic hardware platform with NDE data analysis software will produce a robotic inspection tool to detect, characterize and map the subsurface defects. The robotic inspection tool can be deployed for bridge inspection, which will meet the INSPIRE UTC goal of making inspection and maintenance more reliable and cost-effective. This project will produce a field deployable robot (i.e., Impact-Rover-V2) with vertical mobility that carries cameras and impacting mechanism and data collection subsystem. It is envisioned that the robot can detect and evaluate both surface cracks and subsurface defects using the visual inspection and impact sounding/echo technology