Application of Autonomous Robots for Health Monitoring of Structures: A Review

This paper highlights the status with regard to structural health monitoring and robotic application on structures. This review begins with application of autonomous robot for damage detection and inspection, which goes on to discuss robots that are developed for mobile platform and various sensors employed to sense the defects. This paper includes the application of artificial intelligence that helps in automated data collection and data analysis techniques to improve several aspects of the construction engineering, safety management, risk analysis and prediction. It includes vision based robotic senses for structural health monitoring, vision based structural crack detection, visual based structural displacement monitoring and wireless structural health monitoring. The focus of this review is identifying the structural health monitoring research efforts that include damage detection, risk analysis and structural capacity evaluation. The paper concludes that the criterial gaps includes a lack of validated structural health monitoring that use artificial intelligence to examine structural integrity and predict the remaining life of the structure.