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Western Libraries Undergraduate Research Awards (WLURAs)

Recent Developments of Next-generation Unmanned Underwater Vehicle-based Structural Health Monitoring Technologies

Abstract

The structural health of underwater infrastructure such as bridges, dams, and pipelines is constantly degrading due to aging, fatigue from constant use, and environment wear. Historically, these structures have been inspected by human divers; however, the need for safer and cost-effective monitoring has fostered the development of unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) capable of performing subsea surveillance. This paper provides a concise and systematic review of emerging technologies and methodologies used to deploy underwater vehicles to perform inspections. Literature is classified into two main groups, advancements to drone designs and capabilities, and advancements to instrumentation used for underwater data collection and analysis. After a systematic review, the existing challenges to UUV development and implementation are discussed. Finally, recommendations for future areas of research are outlined. This work aims to provide researchers and practitioners with a holistic outlook on the current state and future trends of UUV based infrastructure inspection.

How did you choose your research topic and/or design your research question? (200 words)

I completed this research project during an undergraduate research internship. At the start of the internship, my supervisor gave me the topic of structural health monitoring performed by underwater drones since he was planning to do research in this field. After a preliminary round of research, it became clear that this topic was very broad as it relates to various aspects of civil engineering, robotics, and machine learning. To quantify the most relevant topics, I read existing reviews about these drones. I also created a graphical representation of the use of certain keywords from over three thousand papers; the resulting graph is shown in the project on pages 8 and 9. After examining common keywords, my research question was this: What is the current state of underwater drone-based structural inspections? What are the challenges, and in what directions are research and development heading? Furthermore, I identified three main applications of drone research that could be used to classify each paper I reviewed. These three applications were data acquisition, data analysis, and drone system design. The purpose of this project is to create a cohesive summary of the state-of-the-art for future researchers.

How did you find library/archives services and resources for your research topic? (200 words)

My project is a systematic review of structural health monitoring with underwater drones; finding a diverse and representative collection of research was vital. I performed searches in various databases, such as Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar. When searching these databases, I found that controlled language and binary operators were required to find relevant publications. The biggest challenge was that multiple different keywords were commonly used for similar topics. For example, remotely operated underwater vehicles (ROV), autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV), and unmanned underwater vehicles (UUV) are all used to refer to underwater drones, so all these keywords need to be considered in the search. Here is an example of a search I did with binary operators in Scopus: ("ROV" OR "AUV" OR "UUV”) AND ("Inspection" OR "structure") AND (LIMIT-TO (SUBJAREA, "ENGI")). After reviewing about 30 papers, I found additional journal articles in the references of papers I had reviewed. Finding papers this way helped me to develop a holistic understanding of how this technology had developed between different studies in recent years.

What library/archives services and resources did you use to perform your research? (200 words)

As part of the USRI, I attended a series of online lectures led by Western librarians about how to develop research procedures for systematic and scoping reviews. I also attended lectures focusing on the effective use of search terms and binary operators. In the final project, I collected and reviewed a total of 80 peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers directly related to underwater drone research, with additional papers referenced in the introduction for background and context. Through Western, I was able to access a range of pertinent journals, such as Structural Health Monitoring, Sensors, the Journal of Field Robotics, and the Journal of Marine Science and Technology. Additionally, throughout the research process, I found the citation guides provided through Western Libraries very useful. Section 2 of my project goes into far greater detail about the literary survey method and the resources used.

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