Hammering robot for concrete surface inspection

A hammering test is an effective method for the diagnosis of degradation in a concrete surface. This paper introduces the design and some experimental results for a novel inspection robot to perform the hammering test. The proposed robot not only has a simple hammering mechanism, which does not obstruct its locomotion and is without an additional motor, but also has a robust degradation analysis algorithm for concrete surfaces in noisy environments. In order to confirm the validity of the proposed robot, a hammering test is performed on a real concrete wall where some floating damage exists.