• Proceedings of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute Conference
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• 2007.04a
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• pp.90-95
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• 2007

Conventional bridge inspection involves the physical positioning of an inspector by the hydraulic telescoping boom of a "snooper truck" thereby providing visual access to bridge components. The process is time consuming, hazardous, and may be affected by lighting conditions, Therefore, it is of great interest that an automated and/or teleoperated inspection robot be developed to replace the manual inspection procedure. This paper describes the advanced bridge inspection robot system under development and other related activities currently undergoing at the Bridge Inspection Robot Development Interface (BIRDI). BIRDI is a research consortium with its home in the Department of Civil and Environmental System Engineering at Hanyang University at Ansan. Its primary goal is to develop advanced robot systems for bridge inspection and monitoring for immediate field application and commercialization. The research program includes research areas such as advanced inspection robot and motion control system, sensing technologies for monitoring and assessment, and integrated system for bridge maintenance. The center embraces 12 institutions, which consist of 7 universities, 2 research institutes, and 3 private enterprises. Research projects are cross-disciplinary and include experts from structural engineering, mechanical engineering, electronic and control engineering. This research project will contribute to advancement of infrastructure maintenance technology, enhancement of construction industry competitiveness, and promotion of national capacity for technology innovation.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.13 no.6
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• pp.901-925
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• 2014

The reliability of a Bridge management System depends on the quality of visual inspection and the reliable estimation of bridge condition rating. However, the current practices of visual inspection have been identified with several limitations, such as: they are time-consuming, provide incomplete information, and their reliance on inspectors' experience. To overcome such limitations, this paper presents an approach of automating the prediction of condition rating for bridges based on digital image analysis. The proposed methodology encompasses image acquisition, development of 3D visualization model, image processing, and condition rating model. Under this method, scaling defect in concrete bridge components is considered as a candidate defect and the guidelines in the Ontario Structure Inspection Manual (OSIM) have been adopted for developing and testing the proposed method. The automated algorithms for scaling depth prediction and mapping of condition ratings are based on training of back propagation neural networks. The result of developed models showed better prediction capability of condition rating over the existing methods such as, Naïve Bayes Classifiers and Bagged Decision Tree.

• Structural Monitoring and Maintenance
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• v.2 no.3
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• pp.283-300
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• 2015

Visual condition inspections remain paramount to assessing the current deterioration status of a bridge and assigning remediation or maintenance tasks so as to ensure the ongoing serviceability of the structure. However, in recent years, there has been an increasing backlog of maintenance activities. Existing research reveals that this is attributable to the labour-intensive, subjective and disruptive nature of the current bridge inspection method. Current processes ultimately require lane closures, traffic guidance schemes and inspection equipment. This not only increases the whole-of-life costs of the bridge, but also increases the risk to the travelling public as issues affecting the structural integrity may go unaddressed. As a tool for bridge condition inspections, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or, drones, offer considerable potential, allowing a bridge to be visually assessed without the need for inspectors to walk across the deck or utilise under-bridge inspection units. With current inspection processes placing additional strain on the existing bridge maintenance resources, the technology has the potential to significantly reduce the overall inspection costs and disruption caused to the travelling public. In addition to this, the use of automated aerial image capture enables engineers to better understand a situation through the 3D spatial context offered by UAV systems. However, the use of UAV for bridge inspection involves a number of critical issues to be resolved, including stability and accuracy of control, and safety to people. SLAM (Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping) is a technique that could be used by a UAV to build a map of the bridge underneath, while simultaneously determining its location on the constructed map. While there are considerable economic and risk-related benefits created through introducing entirely new ways of inspecting bridges and visualising information, there also remain hindrances to the wider deployment of UAVs. This study is to provide a context for use of UAVs for conducting visual bridge inspections, in addition to addressing the obstacles that are required to be overcome in order for the technology to be integrated into current practice.

• Proceedings of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute Conference
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• 2008.04a
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• pp.178-183
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• 2008

A robot crane truck is being developed by the Bridge Inspection Robot Development Interface(BRIDI) for an automated and/or teleoperated bridge inspection. At the end of the telescoping boom allows the operator to scan the bridge structure under the deck trough the camera. Boom vibration induced by wind and deck movement can cause serious problems in this scanning system. This paper presents a control system to mitigate such vibration of the robot boom In the proposed control system an actuator is installed at the end of the working boom. This control system is studied using a mathematical model analysis with LQ control algorithm and a scaled model test in the laboratory. The study indicates that the proposed system is efficient for the vibration control of the robot booms, thereby demonstrating its immediate applicability in the field.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.335-349
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• 2023

Bridges constantly undergo deterioration and damage, the most common ones being concrete damage and exposed rebar. Periodic inspection of bridges to identify damages can aid in their quick remediation. Likewise, identifying components can provide context for damage assessment and help gauge a bridge's state of interaction with its surroundings. Current inspection techniques rely on manual site visits, which can be time-consuming and costly. More recently, robotic inspection assisted by autonomous data analytics based on Computer Vision (CV) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been viewed as a suitable alternative to manual inspection because of its efficiency and accuracy. To aid research in this avenue, this study performs a comparative assessment of different architectures, loss functions, and ensembling strategies for the autonomous segmentation of bridge components and damages. The experiments lead to several interesting discoveries. Nested Reg-UNet architecture is found to outperform five other state-of-the-art architectures in both damage and component segmentation tasks. The architecture is built by combining a Nested UNet style dense configuration with a pretrained RegNet encoder. In terms of the mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) metric, the Nested Reg-UNet architecture provides an improvement of 2.86% on the damage segmentation task and 1.66% on the component segmentation task compared to the state-of-the-art UNet architecture. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that incorporating the Lovasz-Softmax loss function to counter class imbalance can boost performance by 3.44% in the component segmentation task over the most employed alternative, weighted Cross Entropy (wCE). Finally, weighted softmax ensembling is found to be quite effective when used synchronously with the Nested Reg-UNet architecture by providing mIoU improvement of 0.74% in the component segmentation task and 1.14% in the damage segmentation task over a single-architecture baseline. Overall, the best mIoU of 92.50% for the component segmentation task and 84.19% for the damage segmentation task validate the feasibility of these techniques for autonomous bridge component and damage segmentation using RGB images.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute Of Construction Engineering and Management
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• 2006.11a
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• pp.680-685
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• 2006

Bridges are an integral part of Transportation that is always open to traffic.To effectively manage bridges today, more needs to be done to assess the day-to-day condition and behavior of bridges, and the deterioration rates of their components, so that efficient and proactive measures can be taken. Conventional methods consumemore time and they lack flexibility to reach all locations in high convoluted structures which most bridges offer. Instead, this work uses a new concept of robot, termed as Bridge inspecting robot, which, as its name suggests, possesses superior ability to flex, reach, and approach all points on the bridge. This study also provides economical feasibility model for the same and a comparison with existing bridge inspection and automated inspection work. Finally, we have uncovered few issues and did not analyze some information because of limitation to data.

• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
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• v.21 no.5
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• pp.421-427
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• 2008

A robot crane truck is developed by the Bridge Inspection Robot Development Interface(BRIDI) for an automated and/or teleoperated bridge inspection. This crane truck looks similar to the conventional bucket crane, but is much smaller in size and light-weight. At the end of the telescoping boom which is 12m long, a robot platform is mounted which allows the operator to scan the bridge structure under the deck trough the camera. Boom vibration induced by wind and deck movement can cause serious problems in this scanning system. This paper presents a control system to mitigate such vibration of the robot boom. In the proposed control system, an actuator is installed at the end of the working boom. This control system is studied using a mathematical model analysis with LQ control algorithm and a scaled model test in the laboratory. The study indicates that the proposed system is efficient for the vibration control of the robot booms, thereby demonstrating its immediate applicability in the field.

• Journal of the Korea institute for structural maintenance and inspection
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• v.27 no.2
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• pp.50-57
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• 2023

Autonomous driving technologies have been gradually improved for road traffic owing to the development of artificial intelligence. Since the truck platooning is beneficial in terms of the associated transporting expenses, the Connected-Automated Vehicle technology is rapidly evolving. The structural performance is, however, rarely investigated to capture the effect of truck platooning on civil infrastructures.In this study, the dynamic behavior of bridges under truck platooning was investigated, and the amplification factor of responses was estimated considering several parameters associated with the driving conditions. Artificial intelligence techniques were used to estimate the maximum response of the mid span of a bridge as the platooning vehicles passing, and the importance of the parameters was evaluated. The most suitable algorithm was selected by evaluating the consistency of the estimated displacement.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.35 no.5B
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• pp.824-832
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• 2010

In construction structure management, the effects of investigation by the professional manager is dependent on the cost, the inspection periods and methods. Therefore, effective and automated maintenance system for the target structure is required. Although some bridge monitoring systems are operating using wire based networks, the performance is not good enough to show sufficient ability as integrated bridge management system. In this paper, we design and implement an integrated bridge management system based on sensor networks. Two expert modules for bridge management and the integrated system management are provided. Moreover, web-based monitoring system is also designed for users at anywhere. The results show that the system is effective and readily available.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute Of Construction Engineering and Management
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• autumn
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• pp.180-185
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• 2003

The increase of traffic over a bridge has been emerged as one of the most severe problems in view of bridge maintenance, since the load effect caused by the vehicle passage over the bridge has brought out a long-term damage to bridge structure, and it is nearly impossible to maintain operational serviceability of bridge to user's satisfactory level without any concern on bridge maintenance at the phase of completion. Moreover, bridge maintenance operation should be performed by regular inspection over the bridge to prevent structural malfunction or unexpected accidents front breaking out by monitoring on cracks or deformations during service. Therefore, technical breakthrough related to this uninterested field of bridge maintenance leading the public to the turning point of recognition is desperately needed. This study has the aim of development on automated inspection system to lower surface of bridge superstructures to replace the conventional system of bridge inspection with the naked eye, where the monitoring staff is directly on board to refractive or other type of maintenance .vehicles, with which it is expected that we can solve the problems essentially where the results of inspection are varied to change with subjective manlier from monitoring staff, increase stabilities in safety during the inspection, and make contribution to construct data base by providing objective and quantitative data and materials through image processing method over data captured by cameras. By this system it is also expected that objective estimation over the right time of maintenance and reinforcement work will lead enormous decrease in maintenance cost.