• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.335-349
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• 2023

Bridges constantly undergo deterioration and damage, the most common ones being concrete damage and exposed rebar. Periodic inspection of bridges to identify damages can aid in their quick remediation. Likewise, identifying components can provide context for damage assessment and help gauge a bridge's state of interaction with its surroundings. Current inspection techniques rely on manual site visits, which can be time-consuming and costly. More recently, robotic inspection assisted by autonomous data analytics based on Computer Vision (CV) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been viewed as a suitable alternative to manual inspection because of its efficiency and accuracy. To aid research in this avenue, this study performs a comparative assessment of different architectures, loss functions, and ensembling strategies for the autonomous segmentation of bridge components and damages. The experiments lead to several interesting discoveries. Nested Reg-UNet architecture is found to outperform five other state-of-the-art architectures in both damage and component segmentation tasks. The architecture is built by combining a Nested UNet style dense configuration with a pretrained RegNet encoder. In terms of the mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) metric, the Nested Reg-UNet architecture provides an improvement of 2.86% on the damage segmentation task and 1.66% on the component segmentation task compared to the state-of-the-art UNet architecture. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that incorporating the Lovasz-Softmax loss function to counter class imbalance can boost performance by 3.44% in the component segmentation task over the most employed alternative, weighted Cross Entropy (wCE). Finally, weighted softmax ensembling is found to be quite effective when used synchronously with the Nested Reg-UNet architecture by providing mIoU improvement of 0.74% in the component segmentation task and 1.14% in the damage segmentation task over a single-architecture baseline. Overall, the best mIoU of 92.50% for the component segmentation task and 84.19% for the damage segmentation task validate the feasibility of these techniques for autonomous bridge component and damage segmentation using RGB images.

• Journal of the Korea institute for structural maintenance and inspection
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• v.27 no.5
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• pp.67-74
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• 2023

A large number of concrete structures are built and used around the world. To ensure their safe and continuous use, these structures require constant inspection and maintenance. While man-powered inspection and maintenance techniques are efficient, they can only provide intermittent status checks at the time of on-site inspection. Therefore, there is a growing need for a system that can continuously monitor the condition of the structure. A study was conducted to detect cracks and damage by installing a conductive coating on the surface of a concrete structure. A parallel resistance pattern that can monitor the occurrence and progression of cracks was developed by reflecting the structural characteristics of concrete structure. An empirical study was conducted to veryfy the application of the proposed method. The crack detection pattern was installed on the reinforced concrete beams, and the crack monitoring method was verified through applying a load on the beams.

• Journal of the Korea institute for structural maintenance and inspection
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.167-174
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• 2008

Number of long-span bridge construction has been increased recently so that seismic consideration of design has become significant. To adapt such significance to design, seismic design in the newly revised 'Cable Steel Bridge Design Handbook' specifies some of wave travelling effect and local site effect. In this study, a cable-stayed bridge with main span of 500m is analysed having variables of uniform excitation, wave travelling effect, and wave travelling effect plus local site effect. Result shows that wave travelling effect in cable-stayed bridge affects considerably to its seismic response under weak soil condition even though the span length is relatively short. What's more, regardless of soil type, the seismic response has become higher for analysis with wave travelling effect and local site effect than with wave travelling effect only. Consequently, in seismic response analysis of long-span bridge, consideration should be given to application of wave travelling effect and local site effect.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.726-736
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• 2017

This study was conducted to analyze whether environmental information could be used for environmental inspection. In addition, environmental information was collected and then an environmental information system applicable to inspection was (developed) using the on-site inspection of pollutant emission facilities and interviews with inspection experts based on the collected information. Moreover, the availability of the information was evaluated based on the (dual-purpose) environmental information system. The information was accumulated in the environmental information system and controlled according to its purpose. The environmental information needed for inspection was divided into four categories: information on emissions, information on emission companies, information on inspection records, and geographic information. The environmental information for each system was evaluated based on these four categories. For most of the systems, it was not possible to find the necessary inspection records. Based on the results, a method was proposed to connect and integrate the perspective of applied and environmental information from previous environmental information systems.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.341-349
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• 2020

Recently, interest in ground subsidence in urban areas has increased after a large sinkhole occurred near the high-story building area in Jamsil, Seoul, Korea, in 2014. If a massive sinkhole occurs in an urban area, it is crucial to assess its risk rapidly. Access to humans for on-site safety diagnosis may be difficult because of the additional risk of collapse in the disaster area. Generally, inspection using drones equipped with high-speed lidar sensors can be utilized. However, if the sinkhole is created vertically to a depth of 100 m, similar to the sinkhole in Guatemala, the drone cannot be applied because of the wireless communication limit and turbulence inside the sinkhole. In this study, a three-dimensional (3D) scanning system was fabricated and operated using a towed cable in a massive vertical sinkhole to a depth of 200 m. A high-speed lidar sensor was used to obtain a continuous cross-sectional shape at a certain depth. An inertial-measuring unit was applied to compensate for the error owing to the rotation and pendulum movement of the measuring unit. A reconstruction algorithm, including the compensation scheme, was developed. In a vertical hole with a depth of 180 m in the mining area, the fabricated system was applied to scan 0-165 m depth. The reconstructed shape was depicted in a 3D graph.

• Journal of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea
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• v.6 no.5
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• pp.29-36
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• 2002

In the maintenance and retrofit planning of a bridge system, the optimal strategy for inspection and repair are suggested by minimizing the expected total life-cycle cost, which includes the initial cost, the costs of inspection, repair, and failure. Degradation of seismic performance is modeled by using a damage function. And failure probability is computed according to the degree of damage detection by random vibration theory and the event tree analysis. As an example to illustrate the proposed approach, a 10-span continuous bridge structure is used. The numerical results show that the optimum number of the inspection and the repair are increased, as the seismic intensity is increased and the soil condition of a site becomes more flexible.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.41 no.1
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• pp.125-134
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• 2009

This paper presents details on a tube inspection robotic system and a positioning method of the robot for a steam generator (SG) in nuclear power plants (NPPs). The robotic system is separated into three parts for easy handling, which reduces the radiation exposure during installation. The system has a supporting leg to increase the rigidity of the robot base. Since there are several thousands of tubes to be inspected inside a SG, it is very important to position the tool of the robot at the right tubes even if the robot base is positioned inaccurately during the installation. In order to obtain absolute accuracy of a position, the robot kinematics was mathematically modeled with the modified DH(Denavit-Hartenberg) model and calibrated on site using tube holes as calibration points. To tune the PID gains of a commercial motor driver systematically, the time delay control (TDC) based gain tuning method was adopted. To verify the performance of the robotic system, experiments on a Framatomes 51B Model type SG mockup were undertaken.

• Journal of the Korea institute for structural maintenance and inspection
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• v.5 no.3
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• pp.173-180
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• 2001

In the past few years, the nondestructive inspection technology has greatly developed due to the increased necessity to gain a complete understanding of the bridge behavior. Especially, the deformations of bridges contain a lot of informations about its health state. By measuring these deformations it is possible to analyze the loading and aging behavior of the structure. However, the current, methods (such as LVDT, dial gage, optical displacement transducer, etc) are often of changeable application on site and have the limitations of installation. In this paper, the classical beam theory was reviewed and the deflections of structure are estimated using measured strain which is easy to acquire. The applicability of this algorithm is verified by laboratory(simple reinforced concrete beam) and field test. By this test, we proposed correction factor to estimate deflection of reinforced concrete beam after cracking, and analyze about the generation of correction factor. Also fiber optic sensors as well as resistive strain gages were installed in the concrete beams to establish the applicability of fiber optic sensors in the field of civil engineering.

• Proceedings of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea Conference
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• 2002.03a
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• pp.284-293
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• 2002

Using the life cycle cost concept, optimum maintenance and retrofit planning for reliable seismic performance is suggested the overall life cycle cost to be minimized including the initial cost, the costs of inspection, repair, and failure. Limit states of the bridges are defined. And failure probabilities are computed through crossing theory. The effect of maintenance and retrofit is represented using the probability of damage detection and event tree analysis. Optimization of maintenance and retrofit planning method proposed from this research was applied to numerical examples. The analysis incorporates the acceleration and site conditions prescribed in the code, and the quality of inspection methods.

• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
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• 2008.07a
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• pp.1372-1373
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• 2008

This study investigated the detection of corona discharge on polymer insulators at 13.2kV. Also, It will be analyzed by variety analyzers such as FT-IR, TA, and so on. It carried out an experiment and an actual measurement about corona detection using a UV-camera. This experiment and inspection would need to respect the above criteria. It was required to verify various experimental conditions and on-site inspection afterwards, but it was believed to minimize the measurement error by data-basing research results in a continuous manner and it was necessary to establish diagnosis technologies and standards in various electrical power facilities.