Design considerations of robotic system for cleaning and inspection of large‐diameter sewers

Walter, Christoph; Saenz, José; Elkmann, Norbert; Althoff, Heiko; Kutzner, Sven; Stuerze, Thomas

doi:10.1002/rob.20428

Cited by 19 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…13 Wastewater temperatures up to 24.5℃ have been reported in sewers in Hong Kong 14 and up to 26℃ in Germany. 15 Field measurements from rising main sewers in the Gold Coast area of Australia showed average wastewater temperatures of up to 28.4℃. 16…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Environmental conditions and the prevalence of norovirus in hospital building drainage system wastewater and airflows

Gormley

Templeton

Kelly

et al. 2013

Building Services Engineering Research and Technology

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A potential cross-transmission route, first identified in the spread of the SARs virus in South East Asia, in which infection was spread by virus-laden aerosolised droplets entering habitable space via defective water traps is investigated. The main aim of this work was to detect norovirus in wastewater from the collection drain in a hospital Building Drainage System and attempt to trace it in the BDS vent airflow. The methodology employed polymerase chain reaction tests on waste water samples and indicated strong positives for the norovirus GII strain from the collection drain, corresponding to an outbreak in the building, confirming that the BDS is contaminated in such circumstances and poses a threat. Pathogens were not detected in the BDS vertical stack airflows; however, the methodology employed to collect samples from the airflow was considered ineffective requiring further research. An average temperature of 24.3℃ was recorded, together with an average humidity of 96.6%. This research also confirmed that inside the building drainage stack, air flow movement occurs in both the ‘up’ and ‘down’ direction. Thus, aerosolised pathogens could travel from the contaminated horizontal collection drains upwards and enter wards via defective traps or little used showers, sinks, baths and sluices. Practical application: The detection of norovirus from raw, unprocessed samples taken from the collection drain of a hospital complex highlights the need for caution in dealing with these large contaminated systems. The obvious area affected by these findings is in the awareness by building managers and facilities managers that this contamination exists and that all appropriate measures are taken to minimise infection spread due to normal o&m operations. While it was not possible to detect the virus in the airflow itself, it is considered significant that the identification of the direction and magnitude of these airflows confirms that building drainage stacks could act as conduits for the transmission of aerosolised pathogen-laden water droplets. This research suggests that there is a need for a secure and verifiable seal between the building drainage/sewer network and habitable space within a building to minimize the likelihood of any potential cross-contamination and consequent risk to human health.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Environmental conditions and the prevalence of norovirus in hospital building drainage system wastewater and airflows

Gormley

Templeton

Kelly

et al. 2013

Building Services Engineering Research and Technology

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“…The problem in this case is the lack of features and the symmetry of the environment, which makes it difficult to estimate certain degrees of freedom. Tethered robots can use also the tether to estimate the motion of the robot [7]. However, the use of tethers in the system presented in this paper was not an option because of the requirements of the local authorities.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, this requires additional infrastructure and cannot be applied to all types of sewers. A localization system is also presented in [7], based on matching the same visual features used for VO stored in a map. However, results are obtained in a small sewer testbed.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Robust Localization System for Inspection Robots in Sewer Networks

Alejo

Caballero

Merino

2019

Sensors

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Sewers represent a very important infrastructure of cities whose state should be monitored periodically. However, the length of such infrastructure prevents sensor networks from being applicable. In this paper, we present a mobile platform (SIAR) designed to inspect the sewer network. It is capable of sensing gas concentrations and detecting failures in the network such as cracks and holes in the floor and walls or zones were the water is not flowing. These alarms should be precisely geo-localized to allow the operators performing the required correcting measures. To this end, this paper presents a robust localization system for global pose estimation on sewers. It makes use of prior information of the sewer network, including its topology, the different cross sections traversed and the position of some elements such as manholes. The system is based on a Monte Carlo Localization system that fuses wheel and RGB-D odometry for the prediction stage. The update step takes into account the sewer network topology for discarding wrong hypotheses. Additionally, the localization is further refined with novel updating steps proposed in this paper which are activated whenever a discrete element in the sewer network is detected or the relative orientation of the robot over the sewer gallery could be estimated. Each part of the system has been validated with real data obtained from the sewers of Barcelona. The whole system is able to obtain median localization errors in the order of one meter in all cases. Finally, the paper also includes comparisons with state-of-the-art Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) systems that demonstrate the convenience of the approach.

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“…Only a few inspection robots for medium to large diameter sewers have been developed. SVM‐RS from the Fraunhofer Institute for Factory Operation and Automation is a combined cleaning and inspection robot (Walter et al, 2012). The robot weighs 2,000 kg, has a size of 3,500 × 1,500 × 1,500 mm ( L × W × H ), and a reach of 1,200 m. Its payload includes cameras, ultrasonic sensors, structured light line scanners, and temperature sensors.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards autonomous inspection of concrete deterioration in sewers with legged robots

Kolvenbach

Wisth

Buchanan

et al. 2020

Journal of Field Robotics

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The regular inspection of sewer systems is essential to assess the level of degradation and to plan maintenance work. Currently, human inspectors must walk through sewers and use their sense of touch to inspect the roughness of the floor and check for cracks. The sense of touch is used since the floor is often covered by (waste) water and biofilm, which renders visual inspection very challenging. In this paper, we demonstrate a robotic inspection system which evaluates concrete deterioration using tactile interaction. We deployed the quadruped robot ANYmal in the sewers of Zurich and commanded it using shared autonomy for several such missions. The inspection itself is realized via a well-defined scratching motion using one of the limbs on the sewer floor. Inertial and force/torque sensors embedded within specially designed feet captured the resulting vibrations. A pretrained support vector machine (SVM) is evaluated to assess the state of the concrete. The results of the classification are then displayed in a three-dimensional map recorded by the robot for easy visualization and assessment. To train the SVM we recorded 625 samples with ground truth labels provided by professional sewer inspectors. We make this data set publicly available. We achieved deterioration level estimates within three classes of more than 92% accuracy. During the four deployment missions, we covered a total distance of 300 m and acquired 130 inspection samples.

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Design considerations of robotic system for cleaning and inspection of large‐diameter sewers

Cited by 19 publications

References 28 publications

Environmental conditions and the prevalence of norovirus in hospital building drainage system wastewater and airflows

Environmental conditions and the prevalence of norovirus in hospital building drainage system wastewater and airflows

A Robust Localization System for Inspection Robots in Sewer Networks

Towards autonomous inspection of concrete deterioration in sewers with legged robots

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