The goals of the pooled-fund initiative are to engage closely with several state Departments of Transportation (DOTs) in the early stage of technology development at the INSPIRE University Transportation Center, and leverage the center resources to develop case studies, protocols, and guidelines that can be adopted by state DOTs for bridge inspection without adversely impacting traffic. The initiative involves the integration, field demonstration and documentation of a robotic system of structural crawlers, unmanned aerial vehicles, a multimodal unmanned vehicle, nondestructive devices, sensors, and data analytics. Depending on the interest of participating DOTs, the objectives of this initiative include, but are not limited to:

• Development of inspection/operation protocols for various types of bridges with the robotic system integrated into current practice.
• Comparison and correlation of bridge deck inspections from the top and bottom sides of decks to understand the reliability of traffic disruption-free bridge inspection from the underside of decks.
• Design and technical guidelines of measurement devices on a robotic platform for the detection of surface and internal damage/deterioration in structural elements, and for the change in lateral support of foundations.
• Data fusion and analytics of measurements taken from various imaging and sensing systems for consistency and reliability.
• Development of best practices on bridge inspection using the robotic system.