SLAM in indoor pipelines with 15mm diameter

As the need of well-being life becomes popular, one of important issues is clean drinking water. Delivery of clean water from the main water fountain to the end user is very crucial. However, typical pipelines are being contaminated by rust and several chemicals. And thus the water being delivered to house is not trustful as the drinking water. Thus, cleaning and inspection of the in-house pipeline becomes an important issue. However, it is hard to find a small-sized motor adequate to the robot for the inspection of the in-house pipeline with diameter of 15 mm. Thus, this paper introduces a new semi-automatic pipeline inspection robotic system for small-sized pipelines. Three different types of inspection robot system were developed, which have different combination of sensors to realize SLAM. The robot system is carried by an extension cable, which is in advance being penetrated into the pipeline by a compressed air. The feasibility of the proposed SLAM using this semi-automatic pipeline inspection robotic system was verified through experimentation.