# Development of An Autonomous Bridge Deck Inspection Robotic System

## TL;DR

This paper presents an autonomous robotic system equipped with NDE sensors for efficient, cost-effective bridge deck inspection and evaluation, capable of autonomously collecting visual and nondestructive data to assess bridge health.

## Contribution

The paper introduces a novel autonomous robotic system integrating multiple NDE sensors and navigation algorithms for bridge inspection, improving efficiency and accuracy over manual methods.

## Key findings

- Successfully deployed on numerous bridges across ten states.
- Generated detailed maps of cracks, delamination, and corrosion.
- Reduced inspection time and costs significantly.

## Abstract

The threat to safety of aging bridges has been recognized as a critical concern to the general public due to the poor condition of many bridges in the U.S. Currently, the bridge inspection is conducted manually, and it is not efficient to identify bridge condition deterioration in order to facilitate implementation of appropriate maintenance or rehabilitation procedures. In this paper, we report a new development of the autonomous mobile robotic system for bridge deck inspection and evaluation. The robot is integrated with several nondestructive evaluation (NDE) sensors and a navigation control algorithm to allow it to accurately and autonomously maneuver on the bridge deck to collect visual images and conduct NDE measurements. The developed robotic system can reduce the cost and time of the bridge deck data collection and inspection. For efficient bridge deck monitoring, the crack detection algorithm to build the deck crack map is presented in detail. The impact-echo (IE), ultrasonic surface waves (USW) and electrical resistivity (ER) data collected by the robot are analyzed to generate the delamination, concrete elastic modulus, corrosion maps of the bridge deck, respectively. The presented robotic system has been successfully deployed to inspect numerous bridges in more than ten different states in the U.S.