Quake Hackathon

6 september 2021

Quake Hackathon

In cooperation with BuildinG Groningen and the Hanzehogeschool Groningen / Hanze University of Applied Sciences Groningen a very successful Quake Hackathon took place.

The aim of the day was to improve measuring of cracks in concrete floors of large industrial buildings. The sooner cracks are discovered and repaired the better. Three teams spent the entire day researching the possibilities of using a robot with cameras to detect cracks and ways of converting the obtained data into drawings, reports, etc. in a reliable manner.

Team vehicle: focused on the control of the robot vehicle. To experiment and investigate the possibilities a small robot vehicle with omni wheels was purchased, the omni wheels give it a wide range of motion (5 axes: 2 orthogonal, 2 diagonal, and 1 rotation). We were able to program the first rudimentary movement paths that can – from here on – easily be extended into a more elaborate path to simulate the inspection of a warehouse floor.

Team Benchmarking: has been working on an algorithm to identify and quantify cracks and other defects based on photographs. The preliminary results look promising. After some additional training the system will be able to fully automatically create reliable output like drawings, reports etc

Team photograph: experimented with different camera setups. The goal was to determine the performance of the setups in terms of Accuracy – Number of pixels to describe a crack Data storage – How many pictures are needed? Controllability – Is it possible to tell the camera when to take a picture?

Like you can see at the images, we made photographs of a test strip on a cracked concrete floor slab.

The presence of experts in the field – Dimitris Dais, İhsan Engin Bal , Boris Baehre, Peter Russell, Kees Huising– resulted in some refreshing takes and useful suggestions for the future.

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