A Practical Minimalism Approach to In-pipe Robot Localization

Water pipe leakage is a common and significant problem around the world. In recent years, an increasing amount of effort has been put into developing effective leak detection solutions for water pipes. Among them, the pressure gradient based method developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology excels for its sensitivity in low pressure, small diameter pipes. It can also work in both plastic and metallic pipes. However, in order for leaks detected to be fixed, one must also know the locations of the leaks. In addition, sensing the robot's location via GPS or remote sensors requires greater power and relies on certain ground properties. Thus this paper sets out to localize the robot using only the on board sensors which are an IMU, gyro, and the leak sensors. Through pipe joint measurement and the extended Kalman filter simulations show the tracking error is about 0.5% of the total distance of the robotic inspection. With a minimal number of additional leak sensors added, a complementary method was developed to function in more heavily tuberculated pipes.