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Mini robots detect and fix water pipe leaks without digging
- mlok 1y agoI browse in landscape mode on my mobile : on this website 75% of the screen is occupied by the top banner (25%) + sticky "recommended videos" banner (50%). Amazing how they managed to get me to quit their website so quickly.
- fancyfredbot 1y agoThe URL has put me off this website before I'd even opened it in a browser.
- barbazoo 1y agoSame, no interest giving them any thing as little as a HTTP GET.
- x187463 1y agoNews websites, especially local news, seem to have completely missed the meeting on how to build user friendly websites. They are almost universally full of obtrusive advertising, obtuse layouts, irrelevant links, and poorly handled media players. They are really in a league of their own for bad user experience.
- doublerabbit 1y agoThey know the point. They don't care. They only want money & will do so with your data.
- evrimoztamur 1y agoIs there work going on with regards to robots in filthy environments, because these guys look like they're about to get tangled up in a hairy fatberg. I'm dealing with a clogged and nasty kitchen sink right now, and man, and these guys seem so happy to be in their laboratory test plumbing :)
- cinntaile 1y agoPrevention is easier. I would suggest you stop pouring oil and fat into your kitchen sink. These are research prototype robots, they're obviously not ready for the real world yet.
- the__alchemist 1y agoIdealist perspective
- evrimoztamur 1y agoPrevention is not the cure to the tragedy of the commons, we always need to be able to react. I don't pour oil down my drain, but the rest of the building does, which is how my six-meter wire won't do jack. A laboratory environment which is devoid of any resemblance to the real world will yield you different results compared to had you designed and built first for the environments you will encounter, would you agree? And these results could have capabilities not transferrable between different environments. I try to raise these questions in good faith: For example, are wheels the way to go at all for filthy pipe environments with many sticky and tangly hazards, or do we perhaps have to explore more snake/worm form factors? If we design for the clean environments, all the magical "cost savings for infrastructure restoration" accounting you can do will never materialize.
- adrian_b 1y agoYou are right, in the filthiest environments nothing else can be as performant as a worm/snake-like robot, even if such robots are inferior to those with wheels or rotary propellers in nice tidy environments. Moreover, instead of making a robot with arms, which are useful for work, but which are an impediment for moving in a filthy environment, it is better to send multiple vermiform robots, which are designed such as after reaching their destination they are able to cooperate in such a way as to act like a robot with multiple arms (i.e. they should be able to attach to anything in the environment or to another robot with both the anterior end and the posterior end, like leeches).
- aaron695 1y ago[dead]
- josephkaz 1y agoThis looks like the next step on from the CISBOT which is in active service in London and New York. It can crawl through live mains gas pipes and plug leaks in cast iron joints.https://cadentgas.com/about-us/a-culture-of-innovation/cisbot https://cadentgas.com/about-us/a-culture-of-innovation/cisbo...
- incognitojam 1y agohttps://sheffield.ac.uk/research/features/pipebots https://sheffield.ac.uk/research/features/pipebots
- trebligdivad 1y agoThey do seem to have gone a bit overboard on the graphics !
- krunck 1y agoThanks for the non-F* News site.
- mvf4z7 1y agoAnother company developing similar technology in the US. https://www.motmot.ai/ https://www.motmot.ai/
- josefresco 1y agoMore information: https://pipebots.ac.uk/ https://pipebots.ac.uk/ https://www.instagram.com/pipebots/ https://www.instagram.com/pipebots/ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5ZVagufPw1ySKsLq8qIJvg/ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5ZVagufPw1ySKsLq8qIJvg/
- mattlondon 1y agoIt is interesting that they don't have wheels but have like spokes legs? I presume that is to climb up and over lips between pipes and the like? I have a mystery pipe in my house that no one knows where it goes, and they refuse to put a CCTV camera down it beyond a certain distance due to leaving the property. Tempting to DIY something like this... But I have a U-bend in the gulley to contend with first
- perdomon 1y agoKurt "CyberGuy" Knuttson sounds like an Interdimensional Cable character. I'd subscribe to his monthly newsletter.
- Bluestein 1y agoNo offense meant, vaguely reminds me of that "Shields Up" guy, from the Gibson (?) outfit ... ... vaguely everywhere.-
- libraryatnight 1y agoThe headline had me thinking of the Star Trek TNG Nano-bot episode. When do they get out and work together becoming sentient?! Sincerely though, it's nice to see this - lately I feel like all I read about is AI doing the things we'd rather be doing, glad people are still working on robots to do what we'd rather not :D
- Bluestein 1y agoThere's a whole lot of innovation coming down the ... pipe (!) ... ... when the effort being poured into robotics starts to intersect with "blue collar", manual, work.-
- zubiaur 1y agoIn oil and gas they have "smart pigs", which have all sorts of sensors to detect issues with pipelines. These look much simpler, which is OK if the stakes are much lower.
- mike_hearn 1y agoI wonder if they've validated demand with the water companies. Their website doesn't seem to talk about any successful deployments or partnerships with industry, beyond something that was getting started just as they were shutting down and which isn't robot related. Thames Water already uses pretty hi-tech approaches to finding leaks including using underground microphones to find them via sound (with obligatory AI, of course), and then they have been trialling a chemical that can travel through the pipes and jam the leaks. https://www.thameswater.co.uk/always-fixing/finding-leaks-with-artificial-intelligence https://www.thameswater.co.uk/always-fixing/finding-leaks-wi... https://www.aquatechtrade.com/news/urban-water/thames-water-trials-no-dig-leak-repair-solution https://www.aquatechtrade.com/news/urban-water/thames-water-... https://en.gutermann-water.com/2019/09/23/thames-water-finds-a-gigantic-leak-on-a-trunk-main/ https://en.gutermann-water.com/2019/09/23/thames-water-finds... They also know all about pigs, of course. So I wonder what the researchers felt their edge was that would let their approach do better than others. It seems from a quick check like the water companies are still primarily interested in hydrophonics and how to adapt those to plastic pipes.
- frankvdwaal 1y agoAbout a decade ago I worked at a water consultancy company (of which Thames Water happened to be a client) to build a catalogue website for pipe condition assessment technologies. Already at the time that I was building it, there were dozens of these finished products with all kinds of sensors for many sizes of pipes, be they dry or with water still flowing inside. Yes, there is some demand for these devices, but there is also a lot of technology out there already for many use cases. All that to say: I too wonder what makes this one so special.
- prewett 1y agoSome years ago there was a HN link about people in ancient Mesopotamia (all the way up to about 1100 AD, iirc) that had a sophisticated network of canal tunnels, and they had people that would hold their breath and swim down and repair them. This is a sort of modern version of that... Sadly, I have no idea how to find the link, it was interesting.
- Bluestein 1y agoSee if any of these? - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=3&prefix=false&query=mesopotamia&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=3&prefix=false&qu...
- presidentender 1y agoOne of my favorite... solutions, I suppose, was to find a break (not a leak) in a pipe by running current through it and using some sensor (I think the vocabulary is "signal generator," but I do not know). Current does not run further, there is your break; dig and find. When the pipe is PVC, though, current does not run through it - so what do we do? Why, pump an electrolyte solution, and run your current through that! It's simple, but it's not done, and so the plumber friend who told me of the original solution patented it, tried to sell it, and found that potential buyers were almost offended at how easy it was. As soon as he'd describe it to people they'd almost think they came up with it themselves. So it is a valuable idea, but it is also utterly worthless.
- maCDzP 1y agoI work in this field - below are my two cents. I have a hard time seeing that this approach would work. The environment is very messy and there are many field tested methods that don't involve digging up the whole street. One example of such a method is pipe bursting. There have been loads of research in using AI (neural nets etc.) to find and predict pipe bursts. But I believe simple linear regression is enough since my gut is telling me age and material is a good predictor. Where I live there is a strong seasonality because the ground freezes over and during thawing we have a lot of leaks. This is a local issue since it depends on both weather and geological environment.
- v5v3 1y ago>However, researchers at the University of Sheffield in the U.K. are working on a different approach. They've developed small robots called "Pipebots" that can travel inside water pipes to find and potentially repair leaks, all without any excavation. Note the word 'potentially'.So the headlines is wholly wrong and click bait.
- jvanderbot 1y agoSolutions in this space almost never look "like robots". They end up looking more like https://atstrack.com/assets/images/series/seriesImages/F1200.jpg https://atstrack.com/assets/images/series/seriesImages/F1200... or an arm / coil. I worked on a robot that did precisely this in oil platforms. It had to find its way through gross, sludgy tanks to find leaks or cracks, mostly taking pictures to stream back / map environment and not using AI in the loop. I've also worked on one for oil distillation columns. And another one for test samples in composite manufacturing. They all had the same problem: If you're far from the user, the absence of evidence of a leak is more likely attributable to bad sensing than good results. Far, far more likely. And, I hate to say it, none of those actuators are going to survive contact with reality either. Cool idea, but what you want is a snake / swimmer that feeds EOIR + radar, or a floater that screams ultrasonics the whole way through the pipe. Those _have_ been actually deployed.