Civil Engineering ETDs

Publication Date

Fall 11-15-2021

Abstract

In recent decades, the decay of infrastructure has become a relevant challenge of both developed and under developing countries. Prioritization of maintenance and repairs of transportation infrastructure is a new worldwide priority since it is important to quantify the rate of decay of assets to increase both safety and cost-efficient operations. Infrastructure owners need frequent inspections on their assets to predict and to avoid unsafe conditions prone to cause disasters. Frequent infrastructure inspections call for cost-effective methods. Traditional measurement methods require human access to the infrastructure, are subjective, expensive, and unsafe. Therefore, infrastructure managers are interested in exploring new non-contact measurement methods to assess the condition of civil infrastructure. Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) such as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) and Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGV) have gained popularity for the inspection of civil infrastructure due to their flexibility to enable remote access in the field. Development of new integration of methods and sensors in physical systems can provide owners and managers with information about their infrastructure faster and cost-effectively. However, they are in general too expensive to be used by standard infrastructure owners or they are developed by experts outside of civil engineering who lacks envision about structural behaviors and requirements. If low-cost CPS could be developed in conjunction with civil infrastructure managers and owners, a new management of infrastructure could be studied, advanced, and eventually integrated in civil engineering. This doctoral dissertation advances the fundamental knowledge to design, develop, and implement CPS in civil engineering to maintain and keep critical infrastructure operating more cost-efficiently and safely. This research proposes CPS as a new interface that can augment human access and observation, enabling new decisions based on objective information at the site. This research focuses on developing CPS, comprise of both sensing devices or physical system and computer algorithms or the cyber component to measure the information of interest to the inspectors. The work is presented in four parts: 1) a cyber method toward non-contact out of plane dynamic transverse displacement measurement of a moving surface; 2) design and development of the physical component; modification and adjustment of both physical and cyber systems through series of experiments in indoor and outdoor laboratory settings; 3) deployment of the proposed CPS on a real scale bridge; and finally 4) design, development, and testing an additional UGV-based CPS to show the transferability of the CPS framework to inform the future generation of the infrastructure inspection. The first section of this research develops designs, integrates, and tests CPS using UAV. This CPS integrates sensors with vision-based algorithms towards a new paradigm for infrastructure inspection with UAV, validating them in both laboratory and field settings. First, the new system’s method was designed and validated in the laboratory and in a mocked-up outdoor laboratory test. Subsequently, the CPS was adjusted and tested on a real scale bridge. This research identifies capabilities and limitations in terms of physical and cyber systems. This information has shaped out the future of the research to have a more robust system for using UAV for objective monitoring of critical infrastructure with a new integration of sensors and methods. The remaining part of this dissertation is another example of a CPS application for non-contact, objective infrastructure inspections. This chapter introduces a physical system called BRUTUS, enhanced with tapping mechanism and acoustic data acquisition to enable safe, cost-efficient, non-contact rock discontinuity estimation. The cyber component used a machine learning algorithm and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to classify the signals generated in a controlled laboratory environment. The new CPS system tapped real rock samples, collected sounds, and classified samples automatically.

Keywords

Cyber Physical Systems; Civil Infrastructure; Railroad Bridges; Computer Vision; Dynamic Transverse Displacement; Laser; Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV); Machine learning; Principal Component Analysis; Rockfall.

Sponsors

National Academy of Science (NAS) Transportation Research Board (TRB), Transportation Consortium of South-Central States (TranSet) and New Mexico Consortium

Document Type

Dissertation

Language

English

Degree Name

Civil Engineering

Level of Degree

Doctoral

Department Name

Civil Engineering

First Committee Member (Chair)

Fernando Moreu

Second Committee Member

John Stormont

Third Committee Member

Maryam Hojati

Fourth Committee Member

Rafael Fierro

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