A Robotic Cable Inspection System

Roland Piquepaille writes "In a short article, Popular Science reports that researchers at the University of Washington have built a robotic cable inspection system. This system should help utility companies to maintain their networks of subterranean cables. The robot, dubbed Cruiser, is about 4-feet-long and is designed like a snake. When it detects an anomaly on an underground cable, it sends a message to a human operator via Wi-Fi. The first field tests took place in New Orleans in December 2006. But a commercial version should not be available before 2012."

Comments

The Garbageman and the Landscaper

[TheLazySci-FiAuthor]

I was just thinking about maintenance robots yesterday. It was during a nice walk along the creek in our town. I was admiring the quaint little stream of water and the stones over which it flowed and the grass through which it wound, and then the rusty shopping cart.

The world will be a more beautiful place when the autonomous robots start to finally appear.

Steam tunnels or old sewers, perhaps?

[Kadin2048]

I'm not entirely sure, but I guess the idea is that it inspects cables that are installed in tunnels or other large conduits, underground.

Not sure how useful that is, or who it's most useful to, because in my area all the underground utilities are laid right in the dirt, cut-and-cover fashion, with a backhoe (or, one assumes, the really early parts with steam shovels or picks and spades). The only places I personally know of that have big underground vaults and tunnels are universities that have centralized steam heating; there you get a lot of insulation value (and thus cost savings) by putting the steam lines in a vault with an airspace around them. (There are technologies now for putting steam lines directly into the ground, using lots of modern insulation, but I think that's all post-1960s plastics stuff -- anything built before that probably has steam lines insulated with air underground.) Once you have those tunnels, they tend to get re-used for other utilities besides heating, so I could see where maybe you'd want to use a robot.

I guess this is designed mostly for use in planned communities (universities) that were planned out with lots of big underground infrastructure and tunnelwork, or in urban areas where there's a lot down there -- but for the majority of underground stuff in the U.S. outside of major urban centers I'm not sure it would work. There I think you'd want some sort of a "pig" (device/sensor package that goes inside a pipe and is pushed along by pressure behind it, common on oil pipelines), or external imaging (ground-penetrating radar, maybe).