[3B3] Robotic and waveguide sensor technologies for remote inspection of engineering structures
P Rajagopal
Centre for Non-Destructive Evaluation (CNDE), IIT Madras, India
The Centre for Non-Destructive Evaluation (CNDE) at IIT Madras is India’s only academic centre dedicated to research and innovation in non-destructive evaluation (NDE) technologies. In addition to research students and technical staff, our group also hosts several start-ups commercialising our solutions and taking our innovations in sensors, data management and robotics to the field. This talk will provide an overview and summary of our group’s work on automated remote structural inspections. The first part of the talk will focus on robotic solutions for inspection of submerged assets, such as pipelines, reservoirs, dams, bridges and tanks, with a special focus on quality assessment of underwater concrete structures. The second part of the talk will discuss our work over several years on waveguide ultrasonic sensors for monitoring and environmental parameters at remote locations, including temperature and rheology. Finally, our work on distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) for managing large-scale data networks will also be discussed with applications in engineering and biomedicine. The vital role of CNDE start-ups in fostering and scaling these innovations will be discussed.
