Visual and Acoustic Data Analysis for the Bridge Deck Inspection Robotic System

Bridge deck inspection is essential task to monitor the health of the bridges. This paper reports the data collection and analysis for bridge decks based on our novel robotic system which can autonomously and accurately navigate on the bridge. The developed robotic system can lessen the cost and time of the bridge deck data collection and risks of human inspections. The advanced software is developed to allow the robot to collect visual images and conduct nondestructive evaluation (NDE) measurements. The image stitching algorithm to build a whole bridge image from individual images is presented in detail. The impact-echo (IE) and ultrasonic surface waves (USW) data collected by the robot are analyzed to generate the delamination and concrete elastic modulus maps of the deck.