Raptor: A Design of a Drain Inspection Robot

M A Viraj J Muthugala,Povendhan Palanisamy,Mohan Rajesh Elara,Dylan Ng Terntzer,Saurav Ghante Anantha Padmanabha,S M Bhagya P Samarakoon

doi:10.3390/s21175742

M A Viraj J Muthugala, Povendhan Palanisamy + Show 4 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/s21175742

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Abstract

Frequent inspections are essential for drains to maintain proper function to ensure public health and safety. Robots have been developed to aid the drain inspection process. However, existing robots designed for drain inspection require improvements in their design and autonomy. This paper proposes a novel design of a drain inspection robot named Raptor. The robot has been designed with a manually reconfigurable wheel axle mechanism, which allows the change of ground clearance height. Design aspects of the robot, such as mechanical design, control architecture and autonomy functions, are comprehensively described in the paper, and insights are included. Maintaining the robot’s position in the middle of a drain when moving along the drain is essential for the inspection process. Thus, a fuzzy logic controller has been introduced to the robot to cater to this demand. Experiments have been conducted by deploying a prototype of the design to drain environments considering a set of diverse test scenarios. Experiment results show that the proposed controller effectively maintains the robot in the middle of a drain while moving along the drain. Therefore, the proposed robot design and the controller would be helpful in improving the productivity of robot-aided inspection of drains.

Highlights

Drains are a crucial infrastructure in every contemporary city to mitigate flooding at the surface and to remove excess water or sullage in an obscured and efficient way
This paper proposes a novel design of a drain inspection robot named Raptor
This paper proposes a novel design of a drain inspection robot, Raptor, equipped with the autonomous drain following functionality

Summary

Introduction

Drains are a crucial infrastructure in every contemporary city to mitigate flooding at the surface and to remove excess water or sullage in an obscured and efficient way. Stormwater drains mitigate water flow while sewage mitigates sullage flow. Drains are combined to transfer stormwater and sullage [1,2]. Flooding can damage private property and public water supply infrastructure causing contamination in water reservoirs [1,2]. The benefits of drainage systems are the continuous water supply, distribution, and storage with minimal wastage, and controlled sullage disposal. Drainage systems come with many challenges [3]. Coupled with pathogenic pollution in drainage systems, the human labour needed to maintain them may be deemed unsafe and costly [6]

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