Customer Case | Underwater Vehicle Assists Inspect Urban Underground Pipe Network

May 08, 2022

In October 2021, AoHI Underwater Vehicle was invited by the government of Yancheng City, Jiangsu Province, and went to the area with its underwater vehicle to carry out urban underground pipeline inspection work. Through the demonstration of live operation of the underwater vehicle on site, the detection of the designated test pipeline was successfully completed, which significantly improved the efficiency of engineering operations and laid a solid foundation for carrying out standardized and patterned operations.

FindROV C20, a small industrial-grade underwater vehicle from AOHI, was used in the operation. It has the advantages of miniaturization, low cost, high flexibility and so on, which is ideal for replacing difficult manual work in the inspection of urban pipelines. In view of the sewage pipeline dark, sundry, poor vision of the environmental characteristics. The C20 is equipped with a multi-channel optic system, integrated with a customized pipeline scanning imaging sonar and a two-dimensional section imaging sonar to effectively face the complex environment inside the pipeline.

At a road in Yancheng, the FindROV underwater vehicle enters the pipeline through the wellhead, perfectly adapting to the urban pipeline work environment.1-2 engineers can be quickly deployed to carry out urban pipeline network operations.

When encountering pipeline deposits, we can visualize the undulating changes of the deposits and the length of the deposits from the images of the 2D sonar, we can also observe the siltation on the whole pipeline cross-section from the cross-sectional sonar.

During this engineering mission, the operators found some unescaped air still remaining above several sections of the underwater pipeline through anomalous images from the pipeline sonar, and did not find any damage to the pipeline.

The successful completion of this urban underground pipeline inspection task in Yancheng marks that this urban full water pipeline inspection robot system, which is composed of FindROV C20 as the main body, configured with multi-channel vision and light system and equipped with customized professional-grade pipeline scanning sonar and imaging sonar, has been verified in practice. In the future, in this application field, FindROV will continue to optimize the product and integrate the new AI intelligent inspection technology to make the urban pipe network inspection more intelligent, efficient and economical!