Autonomous Robot System for Inspection of Defects in Civil Infrastructures

Abstract

Inspection of defects in civil infrastructure has been a constant field of research. In the current operational paradigm, a technician is responsible to go physically to the field in order to measure cracks in the structures. In this paper, a fully autonomous system is developed with the goal to automate the crack measurement process. The proposed system uses a robot, machine vision algorithms, and a database for the automation of the task: a sequence of images is taken by a camera, the algorithms process them and the results are stored into a database that keeps a history of measurement for structural assessment. Experimental results validate the technical feasibility of the proposed system.