“Data from the U.S. National Bridge Inventory shows that over 600,000 bridges in our nation cross roadways and rivers, and over 40% of those bridges are over 50 years old — making regular and thorough inspections crucial,” says Chen, S&T’s Robert W. Abbett Distinguished Chair in Civil Engineering and director of the Center for Intelligent Infrastructure and the INSPIRE University Transportation Center.
“Up until now, bridge inspections have been a visual process conducted manually by human inspectors, and this has been cumbersome, expensive and with safety risks,” he says. “But BIRDS will revolutionize bridge inspections, and it is humbling to me for ASCE to recognize this with the Charles Pankow Award for Innovation.”
According to the ASCE website, the Pankow Award “recognizes the contributions of organizations working collaboratively to advance the design and construction industry by introducing innovation into practice.”
Chen is the principal investigator for BIRDS, which includes three primary components: a hybrid unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that flies and can attach to and crawl on bridge girders to capture inspection data with infrared cameras and lidar; a second UAV that carries and deploys a small bicycle-like crawler to inspect steel components with a microscope or crack probe; and a third UAV equipped with a manipulator to perform maintenance tasks and defect testing on concrete.
“Federal standards require regular bridge inspections, which can be a challenge due to the sheer number of bridges and their difficulty to access,” Chen says. “The inspection data we can retrieve from BIRDS will help tremendously with these issues, ensuring that structures are safe and well-maintained and ultimately lowering their life-cycle costs.”
Chen says the next steps for the BIRDS project, which began in 2019 and has received over $1 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s University Transportation Centers Program and matching sources, will be to continue testing potential areas for improvement with the technology and working with agencies and companies to pursue its widescale adoption.
Chen’s collaborators on the project include: Donn Digamon, state bridge engineer for the Georgia Department of Transportation; Dr. Bryan Hartnagel, state bridge engineer for the Missouri Department of Transportation; Dr. Hung La, assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Nevada, Reno; Michael Premo assistant chief structures engineer for the Nevada Department of Transportation; and Dr. Yang Wang, professor of civil engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology.
