Heavier rainfalls, aging pipes, and stricter environmental rules are forcing cities to rethink how they operate and manage their water systems. Today, most maintenance is done only after problems like pipe breakages, stormwater floods or drainage clogging appear, and it requires a lot of manual work. To keep water systems running reliably in the future, cities need smarter
tools that can spot issues early and help to plan maintenance before failures happen.
Proactive asset management needs far more—and much better—data, including information from sewer sections that we currently can’t reach or inspect.
We propose a solution that:
1. Uses robots to collect data inside sewers, including areas that are currently hard or impossible to reach for humans.
2. Uses robots to place sensors throughout the sewer network, even in sections that are now almost inaccessible.
3. Couples the collected data with GIS to turn it into a decision-support system that helps engineers and operators decide where, when, and how to inspect, maintain, and repair the network.
More specifically, we are developing robots and sensor-deployment methods that allow robots to enter and exit the sewer system through manholes and attach sensors along the pipes. A wireless communication setup will send data via a LoRa network to 4G gateways located in manholes, and from there to a cloud platform.
Read more from the attachment.
