Australian flooding- UMV robots might help

Posted by admin on Jan 04, 2011 at 7:50 am America/Chicago

Juan Rojas saw this about the severe flooding in Australia. Small unmanned marine vehicles, both surface (boats) and ROVs (underwater), can be of assistance in inspecting bridges for underwater damage or debris posed to crash into the substructure and damage the bridge-- even in high currents and turbidity which prevent divers from manually inspection. CRASAR has used a AEOS USV at Hurricanes Wilma and Ike to inspect bridges and also experimented with ROVs and UUVs. Through funding from the National Science Foundation, we have a AEOS (called the Sea-RAI for Sea Robot-Assisted Inspection) on the ready for research and response. Our UMV team (Robin  Murphy, Eric Steimle, Michael Lindemuth, David Trejo, Michael Hall, Daryl Slocum, Stefan Hurlebas, Zenon Medina-Cetina)  has an invited paper coming out shortly in the Journal of Intelligent and Robotic Systems on robot-assisted bridge inspection. A short version is here.