Abstract

Insight and leverage from prior project identified the need for haptics; the inspector’s sense of touch is often used in bridge assessment. Envisioned is the augmentation of bridge personnel by providing a haptics-based aerial manipulator. Such a manipulator would reduce needs to ascend elevated structures like under bridge decks and cabling. There is recent work that uses haptics in aerial manipulation. But these center on autonomous multi-drone flight formation for aerial shows or cooperative object delivery and are relatively straight-forward. The sense of touch is used to provide spatial distance between drones. By contrast, this proposal’s novelty and merit are centered on human-in-the-loop aerial manipulation. The notion is that the expert bridge worker remotely configures the aerial manipulator to “probe” areas of interest and “operate” maintenance procedures. This project integrates haptics, augmented reality, and drone mounted arm. The specific objective is to characterize haptics and AR for their applicability to perform remote probing (i.e. inspection) and operation (i.e. maintenance).

Department(s)

Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering

Research Center/Lab(s)

INSPIRE - University Transportation Center

Sponsor(s)

Office of the Assistant Secretary for Research and Technology U.S. Department of Transportation 1200 New Jersey Avenue, SE Washington, DC 20590

Comments

Principal Investigator: Paul Oh

Grant #: USDOT # 69A3551747126

Grant Period: 11/30/2016 - 09/30/2024

Project Period: 01/01/2020 - 12/31/2021

The investigation was conducted under the auspices of the INSPIRE University Transportation Center.

Keywords and Phrases

Bridge Maintenance, Drones, Manipulation

Report Number

INSPIRE-014

Document Type

Technical Report

Document Version

Final Version

File Type

text

Language(s)

English

Rights

© 2025 Missouri University of Science and Technology, All rights reserved.

Publication Date

August 9, 2023

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