Automatic impact-sounding acoustic inspection of concrete structure

Impact sounding signal has been shown containing information about the flaws of structural integrity and subsurface objects from previous research. As a non-destructive testing (NDT) method, one of the biggest challenges in impact-sounding based inspection is the subsurface targets detection and reconstruction. To address this issue, this paper presents the importance and practicability of using solenoid to trigger impact sounding signal and using acoustic data to reconstruct underground objects. First, by taking advantage of Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (V-SLAM), we could obtain the 3D position of the robot during the inspection. Second, our NDE method is based on Frequency Density (FD) analysis for the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) of the impact sounding signal. At last, by combining the 3D position data and acoustic data, this paper creates a 3D map to highlight the possible subsurface objects. The experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the method. © 2021 International Conference on Structural Health Monitoring of Intelligent Infrastructure: Transferring Research into Practice, SHMII. All rights reserved