Nondestructive Data Driven Motion Planning for Inspection Robots (AS-5)
During the first five years, the team led by Dr. Hung La of the Advanced Robotics and Automation (ARA) lab at the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR), has developed five different climbing robotic prototypes (wheeled mobile robot, tank-liked robot, roller-chain liked robot, inch-worm-like robot, and bicycle robot) to perform data collection on complex steel structures and steel bridges. Additionally, the ARA team developed a control framework to allow the user to manually control these robots to climb on various steel structures (both flat and curving surfaces). The team also partially developed a navigation algorithm based on point-cloud data extracted from 3D stereo cameras and a LiDAR to allow these robots to safely traverse on bridge’s steel members. In the final year of this project, the ARA team will focus on the development of navigation and motion planning algorithms to provide these climbing robotic systems a fully autonomous navigation function so that they can safely traverse on and visit all steel members of the bridge for efficient inspection. To achieve this goal, we plan to (1) develop a method to segment the workspace into multiple clusters and represents them by a set of boundary points, then the Expectation Maximization-Gaussian Mixture Model (EM GMM) method will be utilized to classify these boundary points into irregular dimensional clusters for efficient motion planning, (2) develop a software with Graphic User Interface for the user operation, and (3) test and validate the proposed autonomous navigation and motion planning algorithms on the ARA robots in both robotics-based simulation environment, mocked steel structures and real bridges. We will finalize these robotic developments and select at least one to two prototypes for commercialization. In the fifth year of this project, we has founded a start-up company (spin-out from UNR) called Automated Inspection Robots (AIR) Corporation to allow the team to translate the developed technology to the market
Language
- English
Project
- Status: Active
- Funding: $767678
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Contract Numbers:
69A3551747126
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Sponsor Organizations:
Office of the Assistant Secretary for Research and Technology
University Transportation Centers Program
Department of Transportation
Washington, DC United States 20590 -
Managing Organizations:
Missouri University of Science and Technology
Rolla, MO United States 65409 -
Performing Organizations:
1664 N. Virginia Street
Reno, Nevada United States 89557 -
Principal Investigators:
La, Hung
- Start Date: 20200101
- Expected Completion Date: 20240630
- Actual Completion Date: 0
- USDOT Program: University Transportation Centers Program
Subject/Index Terms
- TRT Terms: Inspection; Nondestructive tests; Robotics; Robots; Steel bridges; Trajectory control; Validation
- Subject Areas: Bridges and other structures; Data and Information Technology; Highways; Maintenance and Preservation;
Filing Info
- Accession Number: 01752350
- Record Type: Research project
- Source Agency: Inspecting and Preserving Infrastructure through Robotic Exploration University Transportation Center
- Contract Numbers: 69A3551747126
- Files: UTC, RIP
- Created Date: Sep 17 2020 6:34PM