Bridge Inspection Automation

Bridge inspection provides an important basis for bridge maintenance. For a considerable amount of time, the current practice primarily adopted the manual approach of inspecting the bridge appearance, i.e., the apparent bridge defects are measured and documented manually. Such manual inspection largely depends on the environment and on the technical skills of the inspectors, which is inefficient, time-consuming and costly; and the results may not always be accurate. With the development of automation in Civil Engineering, there are now emerging inspection tools that facilitate inspection of bridge decks, high piers, cables and underwater structures to different degree of automation. We introduce two representative technologies in this chapter, underwater inspection robots and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which have shown their potentials in bridge inspection.