The outlet feeder pipe thinning in a PHWR (Pressurized Heavy Water Reactor) is caused by a high pressure steam flow inside the pipe, which is a well known degradation mechanism called a FAC (Flow Assisted Corrosion). In order to monitor the degradation, the thickness of the outlet bends close to the exit of the pressure tube should be measured and analyzed at every official overhaul. This paper...

As technology advances, the demand for automated systems has increased exponentially. The development of robotic made it possible to explore and operate in remote hazardous environments. One such application is inspection underground pipelines, which requires a mobile robot that can traverse inside pipeline, inspecting repairing any damage may occur. For rover, diameter pipe required minimum 27...

After 50 years the connections between fresh water pipes (800-1000mm diameter) need to be repaired due to aging and dissolution of the filling material. Only in Vienna 3000km of pipes need to be improved, which requires a robotic solution. The main challenge is to accurate place the robot in the center of the pipe while overcoming the push back forces and vibrations caused in the cleaning proce...

An electro-conjugate fluid (ECF) is a kind of functional fluid, which produces a jet flow (ECF jet) when subjected to high DC voltage. This study introduces the ECF jet to develop a novel inchworm like in-pipe mobile robot which mainly consists of two clamping units (a clamping actuator, an ECF jet generator and an ECF tank) and a propelling unit (a propelling actuator, an ECF jet generator and...

An algorithm for online distance computation based on images taken in a sewer by a robot-inspector is presented. Modern concrete sewers are made of standard cylindrical pipes separated by manhole junction areas. Circular structures typically originate at the pipe ends and entrances as well as at the joints of the pipe sections. These structures provide regular marks on the sewer images and can ...

Robotic systems for water pipe inspection do not generally include navigation components for mapping the pipe network and locating damage. Such navigation systems would be highly advantageous for water companies because it would allow them to more effectively target maintenance and reduce costs. In water pipes, a major challenge for robot navigation is feature sparsity. In order to address this...

We describe a method for an autonomous mobile robot to navigate through a system of sewerage pipes. Landmarks signalling positions in the pipe system have to be detected and classi ed, where classi cation is allowed to be unreliable. Self localization is interpreted as a partially observable Markov decision problem and solved accordingly. The method is implemented and used on a prototype robot ...

In this paper, we describe the vision system for the DeWaLoP (Developing Water Loss Prevention) robot. The robot working environment is inside a pipe (a cylinder), which fits perfectly to the vision system, based on omni-directional cameras. By unrolling the omni-directional camera image to a panoramic image, the circular features of the pipe become linear and by adding a line tracking algorith...

This paper addresses the dimensional synthesis of an adaptive mechanism of contact points ie a leg mechanism of a piping inspection robot operating in an irradiated area as a nuclear power plant. This studied mechanism is the leading part of the robot sub-system responsible of the locomotion. Firstly, three architectures are chosen from the literature and their properties are described. Then, a...

Basically robots are designed in such way that they remove human intervention from labour intensive and hazardous work environment; sometimes they are also used to explore inaccessible work places which are generally impossible to access by humans. The inspection of pipe comes in same category because they carry toxic chemicals, fluids and most of the time has small internal diameter or bends w...