Autonomous Sewer Inspection Robot

The sewerage systems are the large, hidden, and often forgotten, infrastructure of society. In order to maintain the infrastructure, the sewer pipes need to be regularly inspected by certified inspectors. Due to the size of the sewerage infrastructure pipes most pipes are inspected once every few years, causing proactive replacement of old pipes in order to avoid pipe failures.
Sewer inspection is a laborious task, which the Automated Sewer Inspection Robot (ASIR) research project aims to ease, through the development of an autonomous inspection robot. The autonomous robot will lead to inspections that are more frequent, which will allow better utilization of the sewer pipes by avoiding proactively repairing the sewer pipes.

This PhD project aims at advancing the field of autonomous sewer inspections using the image and depth sensor information that will be available on the developed robot. We do this by developing and applying computer vision approaches, which can handle the unique and diverse setting of the sewer environment.