Page 44 - FCW, January/February 2020

CaseStudy
44
January/February 2020 FCW.COM
Using robots and AI to inspect sewer pipes
An innovative solution called Pipe Sleuth is streamlining the process for uncovering structural and maintenance problems
BY STEPHANIE KANOWITZ
Fatbergs, beware. An algorithm developed by the District of Colum- bia Water and Sewer Authority (DC Water) and IT firm Wipro helps sewer pipe technicians get a consistent and more accurate view of what’s happen- ing in the network running under the nation’s capital.
The software application, dubbed Pipe Sleuth, analyzes video captured by autonomous robots from RedZone Robotics to identify and classify anom-
alies based on industry standards and best practices. Those anomalies can be structural, such as cracks and joint separations, or maintenance-based, such as grease build-up or plant roots.
“It’s basically facial recognition...for sewer pipes,” said Thomas Kuczynski, vice president of IT at DC Water.
Technicians program a path for the robots — which Kuczynski likened to hot dogs on wheels with 360-degree cameras on the front — send them into
the sewer system via a manhole and retrieve them at another manhole. The distance they cover depends on what needs to be inspected, but most videos run about 20 to 30 minutes, he said.
The video is then uploaded onto a DC Water server and processed through Pipe Sleuth, which reviews the footage, scores the pipes accord- ing to industry standards and produc- es a report showing imagery of the defects with a bounding box that is