A European consortium has developed a robot that can scan tunnel walls for tell-tale signs of impending trouble.

Called Robinspect (a bit of a tortured abbreviation for ROBotic System with Intelligent Vision and Control for Tunnel Structural INSPECTion and Evaluation), the tunnel-scanning robot sits at the end of a truck-mounted crane and searches for cracks, gaps, and fissures.

Because of its ability to scan quickly, crews can use it for drive-through inspections rather than shutting down large swaths of roadways to check out tunnel walls. And if you've ever flown into Boston's Logan Airport late at night only to find all the tunnels in and out of the city closed for inspections, you know how much time a robot would save.

But Robinspect isn't just fast – it's also quite thorough. Human eyes just aren't good enough to catch all the cracks and fissures that may pose danger in a tunnel, but robot eyes see everything. Robinspect is designed to analyze surface defects, measure defects and the distance between cracks, and detect open joints.

A prototype is due to go into service at the end of 2014 in the tunnels of the London Underground, the underground portions of Greece's Egnatia Highway, and some test tunnels in Switzerland. It's also expected that the robot will do final trials on the tunnels of Madrid's M-30 highway.

Robinspect is the result of a collaboration among infrastructure engineers from Spain, France, Switzerland, Greece, Italy, and the U.K. The primary robotics work is being undertaken by researchers at Madrid's Universidad Carlos III. The project began in October, and has a €5 million (around $6.8 million) budget.

Photo: Flickr/ell brown