4 ms·
I think radar is mostly impractical due to poor signal penetration into the sorts of material (and at the sorts of ranges) that would be useful. Sonar or other
by shabble 10y ago
I think radar is mostly impractical due to poor signal penetration into the sorts of material (and at the sorts of ranges) that would be useful.
Sonar or other acoustic-type seismic sensing (drill holes, place microphone/transducer array, fire small explosive shot, and analyse shockwave propagation) is more practical, but still slow (needs a lot of boreholes), not amazingly high resolution, and probably disruptive to the neighbours if you're in an urban environment.
Thinking aloud here (and for all I know, it already happens), something like using oilwell-drilling tech to push a narrow horizontal bore along the tunnel path, and then sending a semi-autonomous sensor robot to do these sorts of scans at regular intervals might be better than drilling the inspection bores from the surface. There's still a bunch of issues if you drill into a pressurised water or mud pocket, but hopefully less than if your 10m-dia main cutter hits same.