BETOSCAN - an instrumented mobile robot system for the diagnosis of reinforced concrete floors

A huge number of reinforced concrete floors, e.g. of parking garages or bridge decks are exposed to de-icing salts and thereby a high risk of chloride induced reinforcement corrosion exists. To be able to properly maintain such concrete floors the whole concrete surface needs to be assessed regarding the following key parameters: concrete cover, carbonation depth, chloride profile, cracks, spallings, hollow areas, condition of the reinforcement, etc.. As optimal basis for such an assessment several measurements have to be carried out over the whole concrete surface including mapping of electrochemical potentials and the parameters as mentioned above. For large structures with areas of often some thousand m2 the costs for a full evaluation are usually not accepted by the clients resulting in reduced diagnosis works and design decisions for protection and repair measurements far on the safe side due to the limited data. To overcome this problem a research and development project has been initiated with several partners from research and industry to develop a robotic system which is able to drive over large concrete surfaces and to take all relevant data automatically in one step. Furthermore the data collected from the measuring systems can be evaluated together resulting in different synergetic effects: Evaluations on the optimal repair method can be carried out for single points and certain areas enabling the engineers to devide the whole concrete surface into areas with different damage zones. These damage zones can be related to repair zones from doing nothing over e.g. applying protective coatings up to traditional repair by removing the concrete cover. Furthermore detailed maps are available for design and execution of repair works including cracks and locally damaged concrete. Currently a prototype of the system is under development. This paper focuses on the possible fields of applications for the BETOSCAN system.