Coordinated robotic system for civil structural health monitoring

Abstract

With the recent advances in sensors, robotics, unmanned aerial vehicles, communication, and information technologies, it is now feasible to move towards the vision of ubiquitous cities, where virtually everything throughout the city is linked to an information system through technologies such as wireless networking and radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags, to provide systematic and more efficient management of urban systems, including civil and mechanical infrastructure monitoring, to achieve the goal of resilient and sustainable societies. In this proposed system, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAVs) is used to ascertain the coarse defect signature using panoramic imaging. This involves image stitching and registration so that a complete view of the surface is seen with reference to a common reference or origin point. Thereafter, crack verification and localization has been done using the magnetic flux leakage (MFL) approach which has been performed with the help of a coordinated robotic system. In which the first robot is placed at the top of the structure whereas the second robot is equipped with the designed MFL sensory system. With the initial findings, the proposed system identifies and localize the crack in the given structure. 1 The Authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2017.