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About

Yu Otsuki is a leading researcher in the field of robotic non-destructive evaluation (NDE) for civil infrastructure, with a particular focus on autonomous inspection of steel bridges. Their work sits at the intersection of robotics, structural health monitoring, and wireless sensing. Otsuki’s major contribution is the development of a novel steel-climbing bicycle robot, a magnet-wheeled platform with dual independent steering actuators, designed to navigate complex steel surfaces. Crucially, they integrated this robot with the Martlet wireless sensing system, creating a fully autonomous solution for ultrasonic thickness measurement—a critical task for detecting corrosion and structural degradation in aging bridges. This integration addresses a key challenge in the field: enabling safe, efficient, and remote data collection without requiring human access to hazardous locations. Their most cited work (13 citations) demonstrates the robot’s field-ready capability, while their technical development of a high-speed ultrasonic daughter board (80 MHz sampling) for the Martlet system represents a significant hardware advancement. Otsuki’s research is directly impactful for infrastructure asset management, offering a practical pathway toward automated, data-driven bridge inspection.