A RGBD-Based System for Real-Time Robotic Defects Detection on Sewer Networks

Abstract

In this paper we summarize the automatic defect inspection onboard the sewer inspection ground platform SIAR. We include a general overview of the software and hardware characteristics of our platform, making a special emphasis on the sensing devices and software systems that are used for defect inspection. The main detection algorithm makes use of the a priori knowledge of ideal sections of the sewers that can be found in the Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and uses a variant of the Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm for finding structural and serviceability defects. Then, we describe the software modules that are in charge of storing the alerts found by the detection system and of displaying them to the operator. The whole system has been tested in two field scenarios on different locations of the real sewer network of Barcelona, Spain.