NU-AIRE Unmanned Aircraft laboratory collaborates on $1M grant awarded by National Science Foundation

A new regional innovation center, funded by a $1 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant, will be geared toward producing a big data pipeline for rural bridge health management in support of agricultural transportation. Wayne Woldt is collaborating on the project as a Co-PI, and will lead the NU-AIRE laboratory research with a focus on innovative new approaches for conducting bridge inspections using unmanned aircraft.

Agriculture relies on the integrity of bridges for the efficient transport of commodities from farm to market. Unfortunately, a fairly large percentage of rural roadway bridges were built many years ago (some as far back as late 1800's), and their structural integrity is cause for concern. Given the very large number of rural bridges across Nebraska, and the U.S., there is a need for a rapid and accurate methodology to monitor the "health" of these bridges.

The Smart Big Data Pipeline for Aging Rural Bridge Transportation Infrastructure (SMARTI), which will be headquartered at the University of Nebraska Omaha (UNO) College of Information Science and Technology (IS&T), is a partnership between IS&T and Nebraska Engineering.

Led by principal investigator Robin Gandhi, UNO associate professor of cybersecurity, SMARTI brings together 16 researchers from across four focus areas. Support from NSF will allow the SMARTI research team to help standardize the data about aging rural bridges and make use of the massive amounts of information to help maintain and design safer bridges.

Photo: From left Pamela Dingman (Lancaster County Engineer), Wayne Woldt (Associate Professor and Director NU-AIRE Lab), Jacob Smith (Flight Operations and Master Pilot), and Breanna Smith (Research Pilot), [inset: Jenny Wynn (Research Pilot)]