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1995
Book Article
Titel
Erfahrungen bei der Entwicklung eines Roboters zur intelligenten multisensoriellen Rohrinspektion
Alternative
Experiences with the development of a robot for smart multisensoric pipe inspection
Abstract
Up to 20 percent of the German sewerage systems damaged mainly due to their high age. The estimation for the restoration costs is about 100 milliards DM. As a consequence the Federal Government and the State Governments of Germany have issued comparably harsh environmental laws enforcing the owner of a sewerage system to check regularly its state by means of suitable inspection technology. At the present state of the art the inspection systems available on the market are dominated by TV technology. Remotely controlled vehicles carry a TV camera through the sewerage pipes. Thus, depending on the experience and the capability of the operator diagnosis failures can not be avoided. E.g. serious cracks hidden by mud are not recognized at the monitor, vice versa harmless glaze failures are declared as damages. For closing this gap, in a joint R and D project with 4 partners from industry and research institutes the advanced multi-sensoric robot inspection system KARO has been developed and p rototypical realized which is able to detect automatically (i.e. in an objective manner) type, location and size of damages in the sewerage system. The modular system concept comprises besides a high resulting color TV camera a cluster of different sensors (especially 3D-optical, ultrasonic and micro wave sensors). The multisensorics are able to recognize on-line during the robot motion anomalies within the pipe or the pipe wall respectively as well as within the closer pipe surroundings. Moreover the KARO system comprises an optional module for cartography which explores the spatial trajectory of apriori unknown sewerage topology during the robot motion. Within this contribution the KARO system concept is introduced and about first inspection result will be reported.