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Robot-Assisted Bridge Inspection

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Abstract

The Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue (CRASAR®) deployed a customized AEOS man-portable unmanned surface vehicle and two commercially available underwater vehicles (the autonomous YSI EcoMapper and the tethered VideoRay) for inspection of the Rollover Pass bridge in the Bolivar peninsula of Texas in the aftermath of Hurricane Ike. A preliminary domain analysis with the vehicles identified key tasks in subsurface bridge inspection (mapping of the debris field and inspecting the bridge footings for scour), control challenges (navigation under loss of GPS, underwater obstacle avoidance, and stable positioning in high currents without GPS), possible improvements to human-robot interaction (having additional display units so that mission specialists can view and operate on imagery independently of the operator control unit, incorporating 2-way audio to allow operator and field personnel to communicate while launching or recovering the vehicle, and increased state sensing for reliability), and discussed the cooperative use of surface, underwater, and aerial vehicles. The article posits seven milestones in the development of a fully functional UMV for bridge inspection: standardize mission payloads, add health monitoring, improve teleoperation through better human-robot interaction, add 3D obstacle avoidance, improve station-keeping, handle large data sets, and support cooperative sensing.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Texas A&M, College Station, TX, 77843-3112, USA

    Robin R. Murphy, Stefan Hurlebaus & Zenon Medina-Cetina

  2. AEOS, LLC, St. Petersburg, FL, 33711, USA

    Eric Steimle & Michael Hall

  3. University of South Florida, St. Petersburg, FL, 33701, USA

    Michael Lindemuth

  4. Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, 97331, USA

    David Trejo

  5. YSI Inc., San Diego, CA, 92121, USA

    Daryl Slocum

Authors
  1. Robin R. Murphy
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  2. Eric Steimle
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  3. Michael Hall
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  4. Michael Lindemuth
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  5. David Trejo
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  6. Stefan Hurlebaus
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  7. Zenon Medina-Cetina
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  8. Daryl Slocum
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Robin R. Murphy.

Additional information

This work was supported in part by grants from the Texas Transportation Institute, ONR (N000140610775 “Coordinated Operation of Humans, Agents, and Unmanned Vehicles for Littoral Warfare”), and NSF (EIA-022440 “R4: Robots for Rescue, Research and Response”).

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Murphy, R.R., Steimle, E., Hall, M. et al. Robot-Assisted Bridge Inspection. J Intell Robot Syst 64, 77–95 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-010-9514-8

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