Assistant Professor

Dr. Yasutaka Narazaki is an Assistant Professor at the Zhejiang University/University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Institute at Zhejiang University, China. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees from the University of Tokyo and his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on autonomous structural inspection and monitoring, integrating structural engineering, computer vision, and mobile robotics. Dr. Narazaki has published more than 50 journal papers, and his work has received recognitions including the Engineering Structures Best Papers of the Year 2023 in Bridge Engineering and the Japan Society of Civil Engineers Intelligence, Informatics and Infrastructure Outstanding Potential Paper Award. He has served as a Guest Editor for journals including Earthquake Engineering and Engineering Vibration, Smart Structures and Systems, and Sensors. He has served as Principal Investigator on two National Natural Science Foundation of China projects. Built infrastructure, such as bridges and roads, is fundamental to daily life, yet it faces various risks and challenges throughout its service life. Ensuring its safety and functionality requires both technical expertise and practical engineering judgment. Each time a fundamental technological breakthrough emerges, the field has sought to incorporate it under severe practical constraints, including challenging field conditions and limited resources, to maximize its impact on infrastructure safety and performance. Today, rapid advances in AI, big data, and autonomous systems are creating new opportunities. Our aim is to propose and demonstrate pathways that connect these fundamental breakthroughs to people’s daily lives through improved management of built infrastructure. We welcome individuals interested in addressing challenges facing critical infrastructure through innovations in both technical foundations and practical deployment. Research themes for incoming students include, but are not limited to: • 2D and 3D computer vision for infrastructure condition assessment, including image-based structural component and damage detection, point cloud-based automated geometric modeling, and damage quantification and mapping for structural digital twins. • Autonomous decision-making for bridge inspection agents, including mobile robot navigation, embodied question answering, and vision-language-action (VLA) modeling for bridge inspection. • Platforms and benchmarks for autonomous infrastructure inspection systems, including automated generation of synthetic environments and datasets, unsupervised domain adaptation, and sim-to-real transfer. • Data-assimilative decision-making for enhanced infrastructure resilience, including the assimilation of computer vision and other sensing modalities, as well as the integration of information at the network level. Please feel free to contact Dr. Yasutaka Narazaki if you have any questions or are interested in joining the group. Research Group Website: https://yasutakanarazaki.github.io/structures-autonomy-lab/

Structural engineering