An autonomous unmanned ground vehicle for non-destructive testing of fiber-reinforced polymer bridge decks

A research at West Virginia University has produced an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) that will acquire data from both ground penetrating radar (GPR) and infrared thermography (IRT) for the detection of defect of a fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP) bridge deck. The UGV consists of GPR antennas, data acquisition system, active heating system, infrared camera, computer, batteries which power the unit and a sine wave inverter, motors and motor controllers. The unit turned out to be a complete portable system that combines a GPR, IRT, active heating system and data acquisition and analysis. Results from tests indicated that air and water-filled defects are recognized by the UGV which rely on temperature differences of the object and defect. The passive heating system is an improvement over previous models because it is designed to collect high-quality IR images regardless of weather conditions. Tests show that the software used by UGV correctly identified 45 out of 48 defects while only generating false positivesin 8% of the analyzed images while processing time only takes 3.5s.