Autonomous control for miniaturized mobile robots in unknown pipe networks

Abstract

Despite recent advances in robotic technology, sewer pipe inspection is still limited to conventional approaches that use cable-tethered robots. Such commercially available tethered robots lack autonomy, and their operation must be manually controlled via their tethered cables. Consequently, they can only travel to a certain distance in pipe, cannot access small-diameter pipes, and their deployment incurs high costs for highly skilled operators. In this paper, we introduce a miniaturised mobile robot for pipe inspection. We present an autonomous control strategy for this robot that is effective, stable, and requires only low-computational resources. The robots used here can access pipes as small as 75 mm in diameter. Due to their small size, low carrying capacity, and limited battery supply, our robots can only carry simple sensors, a small processor, and miniature wheel-legs for locomotion. Yet, our control method is able to compensate for these limitations. We demonstrate fully autonomous robot mobility in a sewer pipe network, without any visual aid or power-hungry image processing. The control algorithm allows the robot to correctly recognise each local network configuration, and to make appropriate decisions accordingly. The control strategy was tested using the physical micro robot in a laboratory pipe network. In both simulation and experiment, the robot autonomously and exhaustively explored an unknown pipe network without missing any pipe section while avoiding obstacles. This is a significant advance towards fully autonomous inspection robot systems for sewer pipe networks.

Smart water management

“…They are currently at a conceptual stage, with various models being trialed (Zaidi, et al, 2022). One of the challenges they face is developing suitable communication protocols for controlling the units and retrieving data from them (Nguyen et al, 2022).…”

“…One of the challenges they face is developing suitable communication protocols for controlling the units and retrieving data from them (Nguyen et al, 2022).…”

Low-Cost Underwater Swarm Acoustic Localization: A Review

“…Compared to a single underwater vehicle, underwater vehicle swarms address the shortcomings of limited energy budget and coverage of area, insufficient sensing capabilities, while offering reduced operation time required and collaborative decision-making abilities. A wide variety of marine applications can be achieved using a swarm of UUVs, from military ones like border monitoring and control, underwater reconnaissance and surveillance [1], to scientific ones such as data muling [2], water quality and aquatic lifeforms studying, seismic and tsunami monitoring [3], tectonic plate movement investigation, deep sea exploration [4], oceanographic surveys, bathymetric data collection [5], and industrial applications like oil and gas reservoir exploration, extraction of natural resources, and underwater pipeline monitoring [6], [7]. With smaller and cheaper UUVs developed in the past decade, the utilization of swarms of UUVs has become an emerging topic in underwater research.…”

A robust method for approximate visual robot localization in feature-sparse sewer pipes

“…The sensor technology that is most of interest in this paper for localization is cameras. This is because sewer pipe inspection is often conducted using vision-based methods ( Duran et al., 2002 ; Myrans et al., 2018 ) and most pipe inspection robots developed to date include cameras for visual inspection, e.g., MAKRO ( Rome et al., 1999 ), KANTARO ( Nassiraei et al., 2006 ), MRINSPECT ( Roh et al., 2008 ), PipeTron ( Debenest et al., 2014 ), EXPLORER ( Schempf et al., 2010 ) and recent miniaturized pipe inspection robots ( Nguyen et al., 2022 ). Therefore, it is appealing to make dual use of a camera for both inspection and localization.…”