An MIT mechanical engineering team led by PhD student Dimitrios Chatzigeorgiou SM ’10 and Professor Kamal Youcef-Toumi SM ’81, ScD ’85, along with Professor Rached Ben-Mansour of the King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM) in Saudi Arabia, has developed the prototype for a robot that can search gas pipes for leaks from the inside—then broadcast their location before they become a serious, potentially explosive, problem.
The autonomous robot’s rubber-coated wheels allow it to move through pipes at approximately 3 miles per hour, and a combination of a polyurethane membrane, a 3-D printed plastic drum, and sensors can detect changes in pressure and flow that indicate a leak is present. The computer that drives the bot is able to alert technicians to the location of the problem, exact within inches, using GPS coordinates.
The research was supported by KFUPM through the Center for Clean Water and Energy at MIT.
See coverage of the leak-patrolling robot in the November issue of Popular Science and on MIT News.
See a video about the project, read the paper on its design, or watch a slideshow about the technology from MIT’s Mechatronics Research Laboratory.