July 10, Dr. WU Dalei from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shared an academic lecture of "A Robotic Sensor Network for Underground Pipeline Inspection" at the Institute of Acoustics, invited by the High Performance Network Laboratory.

Due to various reasons (aging, corrosion, etc.), underground pipelines of water or gas may suffer from leakage, resulting in waste of resources. This has affected people's lives, and even caused severe damages or disasters. And the traditional method of checking leakage positions is searching manually, which is quite inefficient.

Dr. WU’s lecture described how the Mechatronics Research Laboratory utilizes the robotic wireless sensor network to inspect the leakage. In the project, a number of factors must be taken into consideration for the availability of the inspecting progress, such as mechanical analysis of the robot, the transmission of wireless signal in a variety of media (water, shell of pipe, soil, air, etc.), how to deal with different structural pipes and so on.

At last, various topics about the lecture were heatedly discussed, such as the way the robot of finding the pipeline leaks, the technique to target the leak location and so on. Through the communication, participants realized that a rigorous scientific approach was very necessary in the future scientific work.

PipeGuard Robot for gas pipeline inspection (From the website of MRL)

Dr. WU is giving his lecture

A student is discussing with Dr. WU

(Source: WEN Xuemin, YANG Xinghua from the High Performance Network Laboratory)