This research discusses the technical roadmap and technical foundations
for replacing human inspectors for bridge visual inspection
by autonomous mobile robots. The envisioned mobile robotic agent
navigates actively in unknown or uncertain bridge inspection environments
to collect high-quality image data of critical structural
components. The collected data is then post-processed to provide
information about structural components and their conditions. Toward
end-to-end automation of such bridge inspection processes,
this seminar first discusses our approach to establishing technical
foundations, such as data generation and benchmarking, visual
recognition and decision-making algorithms, and prototype deployment.
Then, ongoing work for filling the gaps between the combined
algorithms and real human intelligence in bridge inspection
context is discussed. Finally, challenges that need to be addressed
to realize such a complex autonomous agent that performs tasks
in the field environment are discussed. This seminar aims to motivate
further investigations by future researchers and engineers to
accelerate the ongoing transformation in autonomous structural inspection.
27 July 2026 10:00 – 11:00
Location
Aula Riunioni 329
Dipartimento di Ingegneria Strutturale e Geotecnica
Via Eudossiana 18, Roma