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

Hmm...

[Cervantes]

Hmmm, 4 feet long, designed like a snake...

bring on the pr0n jokes...

Re:Hmm...

[markov_chain]

How about multi-tentacled models?

had to be done

[tedivm]

I, for one, welcome our new robotic overlords.

Re:had to be done

[Known Nutter]

wouldn't they be Underlords?

Samuel L. Jackson appointed DIRNSA!

[Anonymous Coward]

> 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.

"That's IT! I have had it with these muthafuckin' splices in these muthafuckin' fiba-optic cables!"

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.

blog spam

[PatentMagus]

Yet more piquepaille blog spam. a robotic cable inspection system is the one and only link to hit.

Re:blog spam

[LiquidCoooled]

Rolands article has links to the

Main Seal project homepage

Movies and pictures of it in action

Don't just dismiss Roland, I found the popsci link rather lacking in comparison.

Automated post: FA void of anything new or useful

[viking80]

WiFi, or any other radio does not work in salt water.

This is an automated comment generated by a grease monkey script. If you agree that the Featured Article posted by a blog whore, or if you do not want to read any future articles with no useful or new content, you can gray out all Roland Piquepaille articles with this script:

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/5735/ [userscripts.org]

Enjoy!

The part that automatically posts this information is not included.

A biological particle accellerator cleaner

[MichaelCrawford]

From time to time they need to cut and re-weld the vacuum beam pipe in the CERN particle accellerator. This can leave iron filings in the tube that could screw up the beam. I was told when I spent the Summer of '93 there that the way they clean the pipe out is to attach a brush to the tail of a weasel and have him run down the tube.

And while offtopic, definitely funny is that one time after they'd sealed the tube back up, they couldn't get the beam to go through a particular section. Investigators found a couple beer bottles spaced several meters apart inside the tube.

holy #$%& a subject!

[blhack]

I think that this is using the term 'robot' a bit loosely. This isn't really any more of a robot than the wireless thermometer that I have outside my kitchen. If you could drop the thing on top of a cable, and it would just wander all over(under?) the city looking for bad cables until you called it home; if it had the ability to make a (psuedo-)decision on what to do next based on its surroundings....THAT would be a robot.

I guess that IMHO a robot should be a machine that could do something that would seem "random" to a casual observer.

Re:holy #$%& a subject!

[radicalnerd]

A wireless thermometer is just a sensor. This robot *does do onboard signal processing to help it navigate. From the popsci article:

Human operators can upload a basic mission plan, which the robot's circuit-board brain fine-tunes as it encounters damaged cable.

What about aerial cables?

[nexuspal]

Probably would make this linemans job much safer
link
PS, thats a helicopter he's sitting on...

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).