In January, President Joe Biden visited Pittsburgh to discuss America’s crumbling infrastructure. That same morning, the city’s Fern Hollow Bridge collapsed. Investigations into the structural components of the bridge are ongoing, and it could take more than a year to determine the cause of the collapse.

How many Fern Hollow Bridges are out there waiting to happen? The American Road & Transportation Builders Association (ARTBA) estimates that as many as 220,000 bridges, 36% of total American bridges, need to be repaired, and that 79,500 need to be replaced.

“Most U.S. cities are still using old technologies created a century ago–like the traffic signal, water/sewer systems and streetlights–and 43 percent of our nation’s public roadways are in poor or mediocre condition,” said Joel Reed, executive director of the Pittsburgh Robotics Network. “Pittsburgh is the city of bridges—more bridges than any other U.S. city. We are also a city that has deteriorating infrastructure. We have old bridges, water systems and roads. Repair and replacement of national infrastructure has been underfunded.”

Given the enormity of an infrastructure rebuild, new methods need to be applied to the task. One promising technology is robotics.

“Robots can help improve the speed, quality and timeliness of infrastructure engineering,” Reed said. “By utilizing robots that can climb pipelines, analyze bridges and capture insights via drone technologies, we can effectively address infrastructure repair.”

Reed said that in Pittsburgh alone, there were companies working across 12 different core industry verticals, including construction, industrial inspection, municipal inspection, logistics, manufacturing, etc. These organizations were using intelligent machines like robots to affect infrastructure repairs and improvements.

Investing in robots is expensive. The cost can range from a few thousand dollars per robot to tens of thousands of dollars per robot for more complex machines to millions of dollars per robot for vertically integrated, enterprise-wide solutions.

Companies considering investment in robots initially weigh the value of the technology against their normal investment payback timelines of on to three years, but in some cases, companies may go longer with their payback and ROI investments. They start taking into account the severity of the global labor shortage, which is also costing them money.

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