A New Approach to the Sewer Pipe Inspection: Fully Autonomous Mobile Robot "KANTARO"

With regard to the current sewer pipe inspection technology, all commercial robots are completely tele-operated, usually via a tether cable, by a human operator. In addition, current sewer inspection robots have a poor mobility function to pass any kind of pipe-bends such as curves and junctions so that those robots are only capable to move into the straight pipes. Inspecting the sewage pipes using the state of the arts inspection methods by the current robots is costly, mostly human cost, and not fast enough to check and inspect the amount of sewage pipes will grow stronger than it has actually happened, specially in Japan. In this paper we propose an innovative, fast and robust sewer inspection method by using a passive-active intelligent, fully autonomous, un-tethered robot called "KANTARO" which fits to the pipes within a diameter range of 200-300 millimeters. KANTARO prototype robot, including a novel passive-active intelligent moving mechanism, can move into the straight pipe and pass different kinds of pipe bends without need to any intelligence of the controller or sensor reading. In order to realize a fully autonomous inspection robot, we also developed a small and intelligent 2D laser scanner for detecting of the navigational landmarks such as manholes and pipe joints independently with main computer system, and fusion with a fish eye camera to assist the pipe state and fault detection