Tactile Inspection of Concrete Deterioration in Sewers with Legged Robots

Abstract

We present a tactile inspection approach for legged robots which allows for evaluating concrete deterioration in medium to large-sized sewers. The legged robot, to this end, executes a well-defined scratching motion with one limb on the sewer floor. Inertial and Force/Torque sensors implemented in specially designed feet capture the resulting vibration. The data is used with concrete deterioration estimates from professional sewer inspectors to train a support vector machine. We achieved deterioration level estimates within three classes of over 92% accuracy. The dataset, which we recorded during a field test campaign in the sewers of Zurich is made publicly available.