Jebelli awarded NSF Foundational Research in Robotics grant to pioneer AI-enabled, aerial–legged robotic system for infrastructure inspection

Inspections remain among the most hazardous construction tasks, contributing to a significant number of injuries and fatalities from falls and uneven surfaces. To combat this, assistant professor Houtan Jebelli will lead a new NSF funded project to develop an aerial, robotic inspection system capable of easily accessing elevated structures and collecting necessary data to complete inspections with high integrity.

His AI-enabled robots will facilitate safe and autonomous monitoring of infrastructure in complex and dangerous environments, drastically decreasing the human risk that comes from traversing sloped or difficult to access roofs.

To evaluate the system, Jebelli and his team in the RAISE Lab will execute several different phases of simulation, in-lab testing and real-world field trials. The overall design will enable the robots to seamlessly switch between flying and walking and will integrate visual, tactile, and light-detection and ranging (LiDAR) data to detect faults in the roofing such as structural anomalies, surface degradation and moisture intrusion. 

“Inspection is the backbone of construction and civil-infrastructure safety—from roofs and facades to bridges and energy systems—but many of these tasks still require people to work on ladders, scaffolds, and unstable surfaces,” Jebelli said. “Our project advances a safer, smarter alternative: a hybrid robot that can fly to an asset and then walk stably on sloped or cluttered surfaces to perform close, tactile checks while fusing camera, LiDAR, and tactile sensing.”

Beyond the benefits this project has for improving worker safety, it will also play an important role in advancing robotics research as it relates to civil engineering and human-robot interface as a whole.

“This research pushes robotics forward by unifying aerial–legged mobility, multimodal perception, and learning-based control for operation in dynamic, real-world conditions,” Jebelli said.

Over the last year, Jebelli and his graduate students have received several honors related to their work in developing improved and autonomous systems at the intersection of robotics and construction. Two of his graduate students were recently awarded a 2025 Olympiad Medal at the 2025 Olympiad in Engineering Science contest for their paper, “Autonomous Drone-based System for Precision, Non-contact Surface Finishing in Construction", which presents an autonomous, drone-based system for high-precision, non-contact surface finishing in construction. Additionally, Jebelli and his students took home first and second prize in the ASCE Global Robotics Competition.