SmartCrawler: An In-pipe Robotic System with Novel Low-frequency
Wireless Communication Setup in Water Distribution Systems
Abstract
Water Distribution Systems (WDS) are critical infrastructures that
deliver potable water to residential areas. Water quality monitoring is
one of the requirements for utility managers to ensure the health of the
water. However, it is challenging to access all parts of the WDS since
they are long and comprise different configurations. In this paper, we
propose a size-adaptable in-pipe robot so-called “SmartCrawler”. We
develop two-phase control algorithm that enables reliable motion in
different configurations of pipelines. The controller in phase 1
stabilizes the robot in the straight paths and tracks the desired
velocity with high-level linear quadratic regulator (LQR) and low-level
proportional-integral-derivative (PID) based controllers. The controller
in phase 2 enables the robot to have reliable change of direction in the
non-straight paths. The performance of the two-phase controller is
evaluated with experimental and simulation results. Wireless underground
communication is a challenging task for underground applications. To
facilitate wireless communication, we propose an active radio frequency
identification (RFID) based communication working in 434MHz carrier
frequency and evaluate its performance with experimental results. At the
end of this work, we design the printed circuit board (PCB) for the
SmartCrawler. The simulation and the experimental results prove the
proposed robotic system can be used for in-pipe missions where wireless
communication is needed to communicate with the robot during
operation.