Review of Robotic Infrastructure Inspection Systems

In order to minimize the costs, risks, and disruptions associated with structural inspections, robotic systems have increasingly been studied as an enhancement to current inspection practices. Combined with the increasing variety of commercially available robots, the last two decades have seen dramatic growth in the application of such systems. The use of these systems spans the breadth of civil infrastructure works, and the variety of implemented robotic systems is growing rapidly. However, the highly interdisciplinary nature of research in this field means that results are disseminated across a broad variety of publications. This review paper aggregates these studies in an effort to distill the state of the art in inspection robotics, as well as to assess outstanding challenges in the field and possibilities for the future. Overall, analysis of these studies illustrates that the design of inspection robots is often a case-specific compromise between competing needs for sophisticated inspection sensing and for flexible locomotion in challenging field environments. This review also points toward the growing use of robots as a platform to deploy advanced nondestructive evaluation (NDE) technologies, as well as the expanded use of commercially available robotic systems. Two key outstanding challenges for future researchers are suggested as well. The first is the need for more sophisticated, and inspection-driven, robot autonomy. The other is the need to process and manipulate the massive data sets that modern robots generate.