In-Pipe Inspection Sensor Suites

Various prototypes of in-pipe inspection sensor suites have been developed to perform data acquisition and SLAM in pipes with different diameters, from 12’’ or more down to 4’’. The sensor suite family surpasses conventional borescopes with its advanced capabilities in low-drift dense RGBD reconstruction, AI-based anomaly detection, and embedded computing technology. The sensor packages are attachable to existing actuated in-pipe crawler robots and mobility platforms.

Planned efforts involve further scaling down the sensor package size so that they can be deployed in narrower pipes with a diameter of 2’’ or less, while maintaining the localization and mapping capability. The challenge to build smaller sensor suites primarily lies in the tradeoff between size and onboard computational resource.