Design and control of a heating-pipe duct inspection mobile robot

Abstract

During operation of the heating net, there may appear leakages and failures in places which are hard to access. Repair of underground heating-pipe ducts requires using heavy equipment as well as temporarily removing neighboring infrastructure elements which are obstacles. This implies high costs of penetrating the failure place, so it is advisable to minimize the risk of erroneous choice of the intervention place. Localization of the failure place is difficult due to its inaccessibility or lack of information or proper tools. So, very expensive is the wrong choice of the exploration place, when failure localization is uncertain. There exist acoustic monitoring devices for rough detection of leakage, from the ground level over the damage, sensitive to the noise of outgoing steam or warm water. Nevertheless, essential is the possibility of estimation of the leakage with one's eyes. Therefore, construction of a tool which could reach places inaccessible even for a well equipped operator is very important. This situation is due to atmospheric conditions and dimension of places which should be reached. © Springer-Verlag London Limited 2007.