A Robotic Crack Inspection and Mapping System for Bridge Deck Maintenance

One of the important tasks for bridge maintenance is bridge deck crack inspection. Traditionally, a human inspector detects cracks using his/her eyes and marks the location of cracks manually. However, the accuracy of the inspection result is low due to the subjective nature of human judgement. We propose a crack inspection system that uses a camera-equipped mobile robot to collect images on the bridge deck. In this method, the Laplacian of Gaussian (LoG) algorithm is used to detect cracks and a global crack map is obtained through camera calibration and robot localization. To ensure that the robot collects all the images on the bridge deck, a path planning algorithm based on the genetic algorithm is developed. The path planning algorithm finds a solution which minimizes the number of turns and the traveling distance. We validate our proposed system through both simulations and experiments.