Method could enable autonomous drones to monitor safety of bridges
Rust never sleeps, and cracking concrete doesn't get a day off either.
The Jan. 28 collapse of Pittsburgh's Fern Hollow Bridge was a dramatic reminder of that fact. The exact cause of the collapse won't be known until the National Transportation Safety Board completes a months-long study, but Carnegie Mellon University researchers have developed autonomous drone technology that someday might prevent similar catastrophes and lesser mishaps caused by deterioration.
Working with Shimizu Corp., a Tokyo-based construction and civil engineering company, CMU's Robotics Institute built a prototype drone designed for monitoring bridges and other infrastructure. As part of that effort, researchers recently unveiled a new method that enables automated systems to more accurately detect and monitor cracks in reinforced concrete.
Sebastian Scherer, an associate research professor of robotics and leader of the CMU team working with Shimizu, said the crack-detection method was one of several technologies that the university developed for the project, which concluded in February 2022. The researchers built a working prototype of a bridge-monitoring drone that employs the crack-detection system and plan to use it at the Frick Park site of the Fern Hollow Bridge to make a detailed model for the post-collapse analysis.
"The automated technology we developed for the Shimizu project is designed to prevent this type of collapse via comprehensive mapping, crack detection and structural analysis that would be too much work if it were done by hand," Scherer said. "Today, typically you only do spot checks on critical parts, since an exhaustive survey and analysis would be too slow. Automated defect-detection technology would enable inspectors to check bridges more frequently and perhaps identify problems before failures occur."
Kris Kitani, an associate research professor of robotics, led the research team, whose system improves existing crack-detection algorithms by 10%.