There’s something ominous about robots taking over jobs that humans are suited to do. Maybe you don’t want a job turning a wrench or pushing a broom, but someone does. But then there are the jobs no one wants to do or physically can’t do. Robots fighting fires, disarming bombs, or cleaning up nuclear reactors is something most people will support. But can you climb through a water pipe from the inside? No? There are robots that are available from several commercial companies and others from university researchers from multiple continents.
If you think about it, it makes sense. For years, companies that deal with pipes would shoot large slugs, or “pigs”, through the pipeline to scrape them clean. Eventually, they festooned some pigs with sensors, and thus was born the smart pig. But now that it is possible to make tiny robots, why not send them inside the pipe to inspect and repair?
Why?
It makes sense that anything you can do from inside the pipe is probably going to be cheaper than digging up buried pipe and either repairing or replacing it. For example, 4 cm robots from the University of Sheffield can inspect pipes from inside, cooperate in swarms, and locate leaks that would be nearly impossible to find conventionally.
In fact, robots inside pipes aren’t a totally new idea. But in the past, the pipes had to be very large to fit the robot. This newer class of pipe inspecting and repairing robots can fit inside smaller pipes like you might find in a city’s water supply. For example, the Easy-Sight X5 (see the video below) fits in a 100 mm pipe, and it is big when compared to some of the newer competitors.
Not Just Inspection
The Carnegie Mellon robot is modular, so it can handle different kinds of jobs. A mobility module has two-inch wheels and can haul up to sixty pounds of payload. One of those payloads is an applicator for a special resin that can repair leaks.
The resin starts out with the consistency of soft-serve ice cream but quickly hardens as it shoots out of a spinning nozzle that creates a spring-like inner coating spiraling around the inside of the pipe.
The robot’s no speed demon. It can inspect about nine miles of pipe in eight hours. However, when repairing, the same time period is sufficient to fix 1.8 miles of pipe. Even big names like GE are working on similar technology that will spray epoxy to form a new pipe inside an old pipe.
DIY
Could you do this yourself? There’s no reason you couldn’t make an inspection robot. [Stargate Systems] did using a Raspberry Pi Zero, and you can check it out in the video below. Repair might be a bit more complex, but might be workable with a little ingenuity.
Dirty Jobs
Even if you and your submarine were shrunk down, you probably don’t want this job. There are probably dozens of jobs you can’t or don’t want to do. Will you build a robot to do it? Let us know in the comments or — better — built it and leave us a tip.
We wonder why these robots don’t look more like snakes.
Some superb bots in the various linked videos there. I always sort of lament that this stuff is almost always in the student domain, I’d love to see some opensource communities I could interact with on stuff like pipebots.
That last DIY one looks like something you’d find roaming around underfoot in a Star Wars film
Exocomps, early-21st-century version.
I worked in a plant with industrial microwave waveguides threaded through the machinery. Abnormal reflected energy (someone dropped a drink can into the process) could burn holes through the waveguide. The EE put a camera on his kids RC car to inspect the waveguides from the inside.
Back in 2012, I worked at a company on a project that created a “robot” that crawled into pipelines and did ultrasonic weld inspections from the inside of the pipe. It could only go 100 yards or so due to the weight of the water supply that it needed for couplant, but it was invaluable for companies that needed the service where pipelines ran under highways or other structures where it would be costly to excavate. It was guided by cameras and could detect weld defects as small as 0.1mm around the perimeter of the pipe, something that “pigs” couldn’t do, at least at that time…
Good.
Tangentially segwaying into that (ie, not at all directly related, though still related), about time someone starts inventing robots building affordable houses.
Imagine that, no builder tie-ins, no managers, no fluff and duff parasites of all shades, just plain vanilla worker bee robots building what average Sam needs sold for the price he can afford. Isn’t it the capitalism motto, too? The product customer needs sold for the price he can afford? Robots can do that already (in a sense – just indirectly), might as well extend it all the way down the bottom of the food chain, robots for the masses, basic needs, shelter, food, water, etc.
Don’t know about where you are but in the UK the main issue is the land cost. Robots don’t make the land cheaper.
Maybe we should start using robots to build new land…
That’s a great idea.
Having said that, US has plenty of land nobody wants, say, West Virginia or Appalachia … it’s just too far from any civilization, or jobs for that matter. Or drivable roads that can take one to both.
Still robots for the masses … masses already have computers … robots should be next, cheap and reliable, and doing what aveage Sam needs first, everything else – second.
Methinks we in the US are very, very long overdue for the robots building fast, clean, modern, AFFORDABLE mass transit of all kinds, small, medium, heavy weight. Small for Sam to go places without a car, medium for light cargo, fresh produce, Sam’s bags, etc. Heavy weight for moving things around, like Sam’s new house when he had enough of the local land pricing and just wants to live elsewhere.
(US residential regulations are NOT on my side – they are on the side of the mega corporations building for mega profits – if I don’t want McMansion, I have a choice of buying half a McMansion for about the same price, except in dilapidated condition hiding infestation or cracked basement walls, which regulations mostly don’t care about).
Sam-thing like that.
https://github.com/philosiraptor/PITANK
Build? I heard some scratching in the crawlspace under the house and we thought we might have trapped an animal in there. Undid the cover and, to be sure, used a 1/10 scale RC rock crawler with a raspberry pi webcam and a flashlight duct taped on to verify it was all vacated.
“Bring me butter …”