Experiences with the development of a robot for smart multisensoric pipe inspection

Abstract

Up to 20 percent of the German sewerage systems are damaged mainly due to their high age. The estimation for the restoration costs is about 100 billions DIM. As a consequence the German Government has issued comparably harsh environmental laws enforcing the owner of a sewerage system to check regularily its state by means of suitable inspection technology. However, at the present state of the art the inspection systems available on the market which are dominated by rather simple TV technology can not sufficiently comply with the qualified inspection demands. For closing this gap, in a joint R&D project with 4 partners from industry and research institutes the advanced multi-sensoric robot inspection system KARO has been developed and prototypically realized which is able to detect automatically type, location and size of damages in the sewerage system. The modular system concept comprizes both a high resoluting color TV camera and a mudtisensor system consisting of innovative 3D-optica1, ultrasonic and micro wave sensors. Thus, the robot is enabled on-line to detect and classify anomalies during the robot motion within the pipe or the pipe wall respectively ast well as within the closer pipe surroundings. Moreover, the robot optionally comprizes a navigation sensor moldule for exploration of apriori unknown sewerage topology during the robot motion. For sensor fusion and damage classification a new fuzzy based concept is applied. Within this contribution the KARO system concept is introduced and about first inspection result will be reported.

A review on computer vision based defect detection and condition assessment of concrete and asphalt civil infrastructure

“…Although this 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 17 limitation is frustrating, it strongly motivates continued research work on machine intelligence and computer vision in this application, and is the driving motivation for this section. There have been significant with computer vision contributions to pipe inspection, in whole integrated systems such as PIRAT [28] [18], KARO [18], and AIMP [18] [79], and the mapping the underworld (MTU) project [19]. The computer vision analysis of underground concrete sewer pipes has much in common with other forms of infrastructure.…”

Kinematic Analysis and Locomotion Strategy of a Pipe Inspection Robot Concept for Operation in Active Pipelines

“…The simplest of these behave similar to regular wheeled vehicles in that they rely on their own weight to maintain contact between their wheels and the pipe wall. Examples of such robots have been discussed in (Ong, Kerr, et al 2003;Kuntze and Haffner 1998;Scholl et al 2000). Although these robots have no theoretical upper limit on the diameter of pipe they can navigate, they can only travel through horizontal or near horizontal pipe networks, with limitations on the maximum incline that they can traverse.…”

Self-localization and 3-D model construction of pipe by earthworm robot equipped with omni-directional rangefinder

“…Therefore, automated inspection by robots equipped with camera is desirable and many efforts have been done to solve the problem [1]- [5].…”