Robots to Crawl Under the City

Johan Louwers writes "Robots will crawl tubes in a short while to investigate power cables running in the tubes to make sure they are still undamaged or in need for a repair. The Robotic Cable Inspection System is developed by Alexander Mamishev, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of Washington. Making use of infrared thermal analysis and acoustic partial discharge analysis, the robot will be checking mile after mile of cable while crawling his way in the tubes."

Comments

Now we know

[snarkth]

How the Sentinels got their start.

  snarkth

Horror

[SinGunner]

This sounds like a bad horror-movie plot. Next they'll start coming up from the ground in some old people's home and killing everyone, and then the police get called in to investigate, but they just can't tell what the hell happened. Then more isolated incidents start to occur which leads the main character and his expendable co-stars into the dark abandoned subway tunnels to search for this menace from the underneath!

The final scene involves a huge explosion or EMP burst that destroys all the robots but also leaves everyone in the sewer in complete darkness. Cut, print, that's a wrap. Where's my money?

Robots good at checking pipes

[Realistic_Dragon]

The SMART PIG is used to check on gas pipes. It saves a fortune on using the old, dumb pigs that they used to have to force through the pipes to inspect/clean them prior to the invention of Magnetic Flux Leakage techniques.

There is a pretty good SMART PIG display at the Manchester Sci/Tech museum (free) with an actual 80's vintage inspection unit donated by British Gas.

Re:Identifiers?

[LiquidCoooled]

Add an "I'm feeling lucky" button to really top off its "none-evilness".

Re:Identifiers?

[Kadin2048]

Maybe they could just write "NOT EVIL" in magic marker or something, that would make ME feel better.

How about "Don't Panic" in nice, friendly letters?

Re:Will this work in the real world?

[jcurran]

I've seen underground power cables in the Boston area, and at least in the ones I saw, there was no tray, just lots of serious support ironwork. Additionallly, there was no nice clean lit walkway on the side as in the video. The problem that I see is that the places that its hardest to visually inspect are just the circumstances that these robots would be handiest, and that's exactly the circumstances that they'll have the most problems navigating.