ABSTRACT
Contemporary and anticipated future construction services give rise to an ever-increasing need for new technological smart sensing solutions that can give thrust in the automation of cross cutting applications with high societal and economic impact, including trenchless construction, cabling and pipe installations, and geotechnical investigations. Along this line, this chapter discusses the development of a smart perception system composed of ground-penetrating radar and a surface rover-like mobile robot, which is able to autonomously perform sub-surface mapping. Firstly, the chapter presents a simulation tool which conceptually realizes the perception system by unifying surface exploration sensors with sensors used for subsurface modeling. This offers the scientific community a valuable perception tool to perform simulation experiments on sub-surface space. Secondly, the chapter documents the development of the actual smart perception system, providing details regarding the integrated hardware as well as the developed methods that endow the system with autonomy features, which allow systematic sub-surface data collection, automatic interpretation of data for buried utility detection, as well as their structured representation in the form of a sub-surface map. The conceptual system was evaluated on simulated environments, while the actual perception system was evaluated on real test fields. Both exhibited remarkable performance, thus proving their usability in the construction domain.
