Currently, people use man-operated heavyweight deflectometer to detect the void under runway and use large cone penetrometer to measure the soil stiffness. It is expensive, slow, and destructive. During the wartime, the operator will involve the risk from enemy¡¯s land mine, sniper, and artillery attacks. In this proposal, a very innovative remote void detection and runway condition survey system using a small robot is designed. The robot will integrate GPS navigation, motion control, visible and infrared stereo sensor fusion camera, ground penetration Radar, obstacle avoidance laser scanner, actuator-activated cone penetrometer, and digital modem 7 sensors to survey the runway with a speed of 5 miles per hour. The detection and measurement methods are quick, quite, safe, accurate, quantitative, automatic, non-destructive or minor-destructive, and without human involvement. The measured data will be wirelessly sent to the powerful computer at the remote control center for further processing and get correct conclusion. The measured stiffness will be used to: 1) locate areas with potentially hazardous voids, 2) identify weak sections of pavement that would pose a high risk for catastrophic failures, and 3) aide in the determination of the pavement load carrying capability. Although the Army does not request a prototype delivery or demonstration in phase-I, based on our rich experience in the phase-I research for SOF (we will enter phase-II soon), we have confidence to build and deliver the above survey robot and its 7 integrated sensors to the Army. A field demonstration at any site selected by the Army will be performed.
Benefits: The robotic remote runway survey system not only will give great help to the Army to quietly, quickly and economically survey the military runway without involving human operation and risk, but also will be promoted to commercial airports. This system, with its autonomous abilities, would be particularly useful in hazardous environments such as mine detection and nuclear waste cleaning. By modifying the design a little bit, we can let the robot carry munitions and machine guns to fight enemy in the frontier. Because of the extensive developments in sensors, automatic navigation and control, wireless communication and target recognition, the system could also have applications in law enforcement, homeland security, anti-terrorism, and industry automation.
Keywords: Void detection, stiffness measurement, runway survey, robot design, soil strength, stereo camera, ground penetration radar, GPS navigation
