Abstract
Water utilities across the globe are concerned with the inspection and
replacement of buried metallic water pipes due to corrosion-related
structural damages. Internal pipe linings are commonly used as a renewal
method to improve structural strength as they are regarded to be a less
expensive alternative to costly and time-consuming pipe replacements.
However, linings are also prone to failure as well. Therefore, water
authorities regularly monitor lining performance, where defect evolution
over a long period of time is an important parameter to note. It
requires an accurate in-pipe robot localization technology. In this
article, we propose a novel method for in-pipe robot localization and
tag mapping that uses battery-free UHF-RFID sensor wireless signals. It
utilizes a signal mapping approach in combination with a tailored
pose-graph simultaneous localization and mapping algorithm. Evaluation
results of a field-extracted pipe sample from Sydney Water’s
distribution network show the proposed approach is capable of localizing
the robot within 2.5cm accuracy in a 50m equivalent pipe with an unknown
UHF-RFID distribution. The proposed approach outperformed other reported
similar work in the literature.