Optimal motion planning and control of a crack filling robot for civil infrastructure automation

Surface cracks exist in many civil infrastructures such as road and bridge deck surfaces, parking lots, and building surfaces, etc. To prevent the crack growth and further deterioration, it is necessary to fill these cracks with appropriate materials on time. We present a robotic crack filling system that can effectively and efficiently deliver fluidic repairing materials to fill surface cracks. Motion planning and cracking filling control are the two main tasks presented in this paper. We present a graph-based crack coverage (GCC) algorithm to solve motion planning problem. The filling motion control is captured by a model predictive control (MPC) scheme given the mobile platform trajectory. We also develop a crack-filling robotic prototype. Simulation and experimental results are presented to demonstrate the system design and performance evaluation.