Bridge Inspection with Serpentine Robots

Abstract

Every bridge in the United States must be inspected at least once every two calendar years if it spans more than twenty feet. The unfortunate reality is that these federally mandated inspections require extensive rigging and traffic control. This rigging and traffic control alone consumes 40% to 50% of the inspection budget. Rigging and traffic control are so excessive because the inspector has to see all locations of the bridge, which are often hard to reach on large bridges. The objective of this Innovations Deserving Exploratory Analysis (IDEA) project was to develop an innovative technology that resolves these shortcomings. With the innovative technology, an inspector sitting in a truck on the bridge roadbed controls a robot that can view the entire bridge through a sensor suite deployed at the end of the robot. This system could reduce the cost of bridge inspection, increase the safety factor, provide better views of the bridge, improve the quality of information, and as an added benefit, decrease traffic delays that are a result of such an operation. The main challenges addressed in this project were to design a new prototype and develop control strategies to move a serpentine robot through the trusses of a bridge.