Assistant professor David Lattanzi knows how dangerous bridge inspection can be because he has done it. Prior to completing his PhD, he was a structural engineer at Gannett Fleming, a firm specializing in international planning, design, and construction management, where he inspected and was responsible for the rehabilitation design of automobile and railroad bridges, tunnels, and other structures.
"Most of the nation's highways, bridges, and tunnels were built to last about 75 years. The big postwar building boom was in the 1950s so these structures are nearing the end of their life-span," says Lattanzi. "The cost and difficulty of inspecting and repairing them will demand that we think of new ways to attack this problem."
Anyone who has ever tried to navigate a busy street or drive an interstate highway when roadwork is going on knows that traditional repair methods can be a slow and cumbersome process. These methods use heavy expensive equipment and often place workers in life-threatening situations. "If we can develop safe, cost-effective, and accurate robotic inspection tools, we can eliminate many of the dangers of this hazardous work," says Lattanzi.
That's where robots can help. But as they become a more accepted tool for infrastructure inspection, it becomes important to consider how humans will interact with the information that those same robots capture. Lattanzi and his team see this as a data representation problem. If the data are not clearly represented or interpreted, tunnel walls could be mistaken for floors, or the top of a bridge deck could be mistaken for the bottom. "Sometimes, when you watch the camera footage from one of these Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), you almost need a dose of Dramamine," says Lattanzi.
The team is studying how to convert robotic inspection information into virtual computer ‘worlds' that can be explored by a human inspector. To accomplish this, they adapted techniques from computer vision (such as Structure From Motion) and virtual reality equipment like the Oculus Rift.
Wearing the virtual reality headsets allows the researcher/inspectors to see what the UAV sees, measure, and then recreate a scale model to examine and find discover and fix structural problems. With this combination of technology and accurate data interpretation they hope to save time and money while reducing the dangers for inspectors and their crews.