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

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 DM. 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 multisensor 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 comprises both a high-resolution color TV camera and a multisensor system consisting of innovative 3D-optical, ultrasonic and microwave sensors. Thus, the robot is enabled online to detect and classify anomalies during the robot motion within the pipe or the pipe wall respectively as well as within the closer pipe surroundings. Moreover, the robot optionally comprises a navigation sensor module for exploration of a priori unknown sewerage topology during the robot motion. For sensor fusion and damage classification a new fuzzy based concept is applied