Implementation and validation of robot-enabled embedded sensors for structural health monitoring

Abstract

In the past decades, structural health monitoring (SHM) has matured into a viable supplement to regular inspections, allowing to execute repair and maintenance work at early stages of structural damage, thus resulting in relatively low rehabilitation costs. With the advent of wireless technologies and advancements in information and communication technologies, civil infrastructure has been increasingly instrumented with wireless sensor nodes to record, analyze, and communicate structural data relevant to SHM. However, in harsh environments, wireless sensor nodes may be damaged and fail to operate. A promising alternative to wireless sensor nodes is to embed sensors directly into concrete. In this paper, a sensor system for embedment into concrete is proposed, able to self-assess the structural data recorded from the concrete. Moreover, the data and information provided by the sensors are collected by robotic systems via RFID data transfer in an attempt to reduce the amount of human interaction and to overcome the limitations with respect to communication range and power supply. In laboratory experiments, the sensor systems are embedded into a concrete structural element, validating the capabilities of the sensors to record and to analyze the structural data. Furthermore, as will be shown in the paper, power will be supplied on-demand by legged robots that are deployed to collect the data and information, which is provided by the sensors for persistent storage. In summary, this study corroborates that the embedded sensors represent a crucial step towards intelligent, self-assessing concrete.