Towards coupling land-based and water-based mobile robots for monitoring and inspection of waterside structures

Abstract

Waterside structures represent vulnerable and often safety-relevant land/water interfaces that fulfill critical operations, such as facilitating commute across natural impediments or protecting and managing marine traffic. Therefore, monitoring and inspection of waterside structures is essential to ensure continuous operation. With recent technological advancements, robotic systems have been devised to execute monitoring and inspection tasks. However, robotic monitoring and inspection of waterside structures, as compared to monitoring and inspection of land-based civil infrastructure systems, is associated with a number of challenges because of the specifics of waterside structures. In particular, the collaboration of land-based and water-based robots must be ensured, which, so far, has received little attention in robotics research. This paper proposes a concept to couple land-based and water-based robots for monitoring and inspection of waterside structures. The concept is centered around collaborative analysis of the structural condition, and it builds upon embedded computing considering the semantics provided by digital twins and building information models. Finally, research directions are discussed that need to be investigated for transferring the concept into engineering practice.