Summary: In recent decades, the decay of infrastructure has become one new challenge of both developed and under developing countries. Prioritization of maintenance and repairs of transportation infrastructure is accepted as a new worldwide priority since it is important to quantify the rate of decay of assets to increase safety, and cost-efficient operations. Traditional measurement methods require humans climbing the infrastructure for sensor installation, which is unsafe. Therefore, infrastructure managers are interested in 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) become popular for the inspection of civil infrastructure due to their accessibility.

This presentation focuses on developing CPS 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 surface;

2) design and development of the physical component; modification of both physical and cyber systems through series of experiments;

3) deployment of the proposed CPS on a real scale bridge;

4) 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 introduces the development and testing of 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. The remaining part is another example of a CPS application for non-contact, objective infrastructure inspections. This part introduces a physical system enhanced with tapping mechanism and acoustic data acquisition to enable safe, cost-efficient, non-contact rock discontinuity estimation

Biography: Roya Nasimi is a PhD candidate with a focus in structural engineering at the department of Civil Construction and Environmental Engineering (CCEE) of the university of The New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her research is on design and development of Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) for infrastructure monitoring. She recently finished her Ph.D. and will continue conducting research as a postdoc at Smart Management of Infrastructure Laboratory (SMILab) with a focus on non-contact infrastructure monitoring and smart cities. She got her masters in structural engineering at the university of Tabriz in 2017. Nasimi’s research interests include but are not limited to low-cost sensors, lasers, computer vision, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), machine learning, signal processing, and railroad bridges.