Development of Semi-Automatic Inspection System for Indoor Pipeline

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, there does not exist 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-automotive pipeline inspection robot system for small-sized pipelines. It consists of a camera module, a steering mechanism, a gyro sensor, and an encoder to locate the position and orientation of the robot inside the pipeline. The robot system is carried by an extension cable, which is in advance being penetrated into the pipeline by a compressed air. Also the robot system has the map building function. A lab prototype for the semi-automatic pipeline robot was developed to test the feasibility as the pipeline inspection robot system. The feasibility of this semi-automatic pipeline inspection method was proven successfully through experimentation.