Bridge inspection by unmanned, hovering robots
Rodney Brown writes in Mass High Tech that iRobot founder Helen Greiner‘s new company CyPhy works has landed a $2.4 million research award from NIST to figure out how to improve inspection and monitoring of civil infrastructure — highways, bridges and dams — using unmanned aerial vehicles.
As Greiner puts it, “There are 600,000 bridge in the United States, and there is a mandate for inspection of each of them every two years.” The mandate, by the way, comes from the National Bridge Inspection Standards (NBIS) from the U.S. Dept of Transportation.
Teamed up with the Georgia Institute of Technology Research Corp., CyPhy will work on a remote inspection system based on small, unmanned, hovering robots fitted with video cameras and other sensors. The planned hovering UAV would slowly move around bridges and similar structures to gather close-up, HD images.
Such systems have long been pursued as the holy grail of bridge inspection, due to cost, safety and accuracy. A Bridge Inspection Robotic Development Interface (BIRDI) constortium was launched in Korea, for example, with the primary goal to develop advanced robot systems for automated bridge inspection and monitoring while reducing human risks and improving efficiency and data reliability.
