Development of an automatic concrete-tunnel inspection system by an autonomous mobile robot

This paper relates the development of ail automatic concrete-tunnel inspection system by an autonomous mobile robot. This work was motivated by the accidents happened recently, that were caused by the fallen parts of the inner-wall all of the concrete-tunnels. This brought about the serious damage of the national property, and led to the great worries of the whole society. Here, we proposed a non-destructive automatic tunnel inspection method. In this method, we aim to inspect the tunnel automatically and completely at high-speed by using non-destructive sensors. For the non-destructive sensors, we employ 24 ultrasonic sensors and 6 video cameras. These sensors are mounted on the same plane in the shore of semi-ring. This ultrasonic-sensor video-camera semi-ring is called as USVC semi-ring. This USVC is mounted on an autonomous mobile to inspect the concrete-tunnel. Experiment results show that this system can detect the deformed inner-wall at the division of 8 mm, when the robot moves at 20 mm. S.