In the maintenance of RC (reinforced concrete) structures,
it being very important to know the exact position of the reinforcing
steel, there has not been developed a technique to detect the exact
position of the reinforcing steel, for the time being.
In this talk, we develop a theory to exactly probe the reinforcing
steel in RC structures by application of an apparatus to measure
thickness of concrete cover for reinforcing steel by electromagnetic
induction method, whose measurements are well known to be inexact
because of the errors and the noises the apparatus contains.
For the exact probe of the reinforcing steel,
the idea of the least square solution plays an important role.
We also show the results of our experiments to verify our theory
and mention the importance of our theory in view of the development of
ultrasonic CT (computerized tomography) for RC structures.
(This is a joint work with N. Mita, T. Ochi, K. Hashizume and T. Takabatake)