BridgeBots
The BridgeBot climbing a rusty metal girder.
The undersides of bridges are often complex mazes of girders, beams, and rivets. Maintaining these structures requires workers wearing safety harnesses and using complex equipment to climb through and check for damage – often without any indication where it might be or if it exists at all. This is time-consuming, dangerous, and expensive, so bridge maintenance is often neglected. In 2013, Transportation for America reported that 1 in 9 US bridges was structurally deficient and 1 in 4 would be 65 years old by 2023 [1].
Enter BridgeBot. Bridge Risk Investigation Diagnostic Grouped Exploratory (BRIDGE) Bot is a small magnetic robot that can explore complex metallic environments. It uses magnetic wheels to stick to metal surfaces and flexible legs to transition from horizontal to vertical and back. It can climb sideways, upside down, or on an angle to take photos of potential damage and wirelessly transmit them back to human inspectors, who can asses whether repairs are needed. This saves time and money by only requiring human inspection when absolutely necessary.
My research involved developing the mechanical design for the BridgeBot. The legs are made of a gradient of flexible and rigid plastics that can provide structural support yet still flex for many cycles without cracking. I also helped develop the magnetic wheels, which use disk magnets held away from the ground by rubber treads to prevent the large forces required to separate magnets from a surface.
BridgeBots were developed at the UMD Microrobotics Laboratory.
Publications
Sirken, Aaron, et al. “Bridge risk investigation diagnostic grouped exploratory (BRIDGE) bot.” Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2017 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on. IEEE, 2017.