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This paper presents a new, robust and reliable robot capable of carrying heavy equipment loads without sacrificing mobility that can improve the safety and detail of steel inspections in difficult access areas. In addition, the robot functions with an embedded NORTEC 600, eddy current sensor, and a GoPro camera that allows it to conduct nondestructive evaluation and collect high-resolution imagery data of steel structures. The data is processed into a heatmap for quick and easy interpretation by the user. In order to verify the robot’s designed capabilities, a set of mechanical analyses were performed to quantify the designed robot’s limits and failure mechanics. The application of our robot would increase the safety of an inspector by reducing the frequency they would need to hang underneath a bridge or travel along a narrow section. Demonstration of the robot deployments can be seen in this link: https://youtu.be/8d78d7CWXYk 

The research of robots to assist people in inspecting the quality of steel bridges has attracted significant attention in recent years. However, the intricate structure of the steel bridge components poses a massive challenge for researchers to move the robot across the bridge to perform the tests. This paper presents a new development of a hybrid flying-climbing robotic system, which can move flexibly and quickly to different positions on the steel bridge. In addition to using high-resolution cameras for an overview, the design allows the robot to stick to steel surfaces and act as a mobile robot for more detailed inspection with our developed giant magneto-resistance (GMR) sensor array system. We conduct a mechanical analysis to show the climbing capability of the mobile part. Additionally, we develop a landing algorithm to allow the robot to land on a steel surface to perform in-depth inspection safely. The designed GMR sensor array has shown the capability of detecting steel cracks to support the in-depth inspection mode. We have tested and validated our developed robot on real bridges to ensure that the design works well and is stable. 

The advanced robotic and automation (ARA) lab has developed and successfully implemented a design inspired by many of the various cutting edge steel inspection robots to date. The combination of these robots concepts into a unified design came with its own set of challenges since the parameters for these features sometimes conflicted. An extensive amount of design and analysis work was performed by the ARA lab in order to find a carefully tuned balance between the implemented features on the ARA robot and general functionality. Having successfully managed to implement this conglomerate of features represents a breakthrough to the industry of steel inspection robots as the ARA lab robot is capable of traversing most complex geometries found on steel structures while still maintaining its ability to efficiently travel along these structures; a feat yet to be done until now. 

An industrial environment usually has a lot of waste that could cause harmful effects to both the products and the workers resulting in product defects, itchy eyes or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, etc. While automatic cleaning robots could be used, the environment is often too large for one robot to clean alone in addition to the fact that it does not have adequate stored dirt capacity. We present a multi-robotic dirt cleaning algorithm for coordinating multiple iRobot-Creates as a team to efficiently clean an environment. Often, since some spaces in the environment are clean while others are dirty, our multi-robotic system possesses a path planning algorithm to allow the robot team to clean efficiently by increasing vacuum motor power on the area with higher dirt level. Overall, our multi-robotic system outperforms the single robot system in time efficiency while having almost the same total battery usage and cleaning efficiency result. The project source codes is available on our ARA lab's github: https://github.com/aralab-unr/multi-robot-cleaning.