  Autonomous navigation of steel bridge inspection robots is essential for
proper maintenance. The majority of existing robotic solutions for bridge
inspection require human intervention to assist in the control and navigation.
In this paper, a control system framework has been proposed for a previously
designed ARA robot [1], which facilitates autonomous real-time navigation and
minimizes human involvement. The mechanical design and control framework of ARA
robot enables two different configurations, namely the mobile and inch-worm
transformation. In addition, a switching control was developed with 3D point
clouds of steel surfaces as the input which allows the robot to switch between
mobile and inch-worm transformation. The surface availability algorithm
(considers plane, area, and height) of the switching control enables the robot
to perform inch-worm jumps autonomously. Themobiletransformationallows the
robot to move on continuous steel surfaces and perform visual inspection of
steel bridge structures. Practical experiments on actual steel bridge
structures highlight the effective performance of ARA robot with the proposed
control framework for autonomous navigation during a visual inspection of steel
bridges.
