Bridge Inspection Robot Deployment System (BIRDS)
What it does
An autonomous bridge-inspection platform combining a drone with a robotic-arm clamping mechanism. The drone flies up, detects a girder, clamps, traverses the bridge for inspection, and releases — with humans supervising via an iOS app.
Engineering highlights
- Multi-camera UAS payload — visible, infrared, and hyperspectral cameras with synchronized capture, time-tagging, and downstream signal processing.
- Vision-based girder detection running on NVIDIA Jetson at the edge.
- PID and fractional-order controllers for the clamping mechanism (open/close, force regulation under wind and platform sway).
- iOS control app for human-in-the-loop operation and live monitoring.
- Companion underwater acoustic imaging robot for bridge scour evaluation (ROS + Arduino + embedded Linux).
Outcomes
- US Patent 12,296,994 — Unmanned vehicle having flight configuration and surface traverse configuration, granted May 2025.
- Selected for IEEE IROS 2025 presentation (Feng, Shang, et al., IEEE T-ASE, 2025).
- Field demos of autonomous flight + clamping + bridge traversal.