Bet you weren’t expecting that headline when you woke up this morning!
Researchers in China has proposed and prototyped a robot that moves along the inside of pipes by its own power, cleaning as it goes. Currently the way major pipes are cleaned or cleared is through pigging, which is basically shooting a big scrubber down the pipe using pressure and catching it at the other end. However, some pipes are “unpiggable” because of varying widths, difficult bends, and so on. This little robot could go where no pig has gone before and enable more efficient piping where it once was limited by pigs’ limits.
I like that robots are filling these niches in our world. When you think about it, the most useful robots to us won’t be androids or battlebots, but common things like Drobos, Roombas, and soon, the caterpillar that lives in your drain. O brave new world! [via New Scientist]
Isn’t pigging what you do around when a bar is closing?
speaking of Roombas, iRobot makes a tiny version of this called the iLooj to clean gutters.
The most popular way of cleaning piping is with hydro-jetting. A high pressure stream of water, 1200psi to 4000psi, at anywhere from a few gallons a minute to 1200 gallons a minutes is the way a pipe is typically cleaning. The high pressure hose can be up to a 1000 feet long. Pigging is really only for lines that cannot be scrubbed with water or giant lines like the sewers in France. They use a huge wooden ball that drops into the sewer and as water pressure builds it moves the scrubbing the line. Scrubbing or cleaning robots are not new, but a self powered one is. Neat idea, but is battery life going to be a concern?
It is very best technology…