Battery-Free UHF-RFID Sensors-Based SLAM for In-Pipe Robot Perception

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Water utilities across the globe are concerned with the inspection and replacement of buried metallic water pipes due to corrosion-related structural damages. Internal pipe linings are commonly used as a renewal method to improve structural strength as they are regarded to be a less expensive alternative to costly and time-consuming pipe replacements. However, linings are also prone to failure as well. Therefore, water authorities regularly monitor lining performance, where defect evolution over a long period of time is an important parameter to note. It requires an accurate in-pipe robot localization technology. In this article, we propose a novel method for in-pipe robot localization and tag mapping that uses battery-free ultra high frequency (UHF)-radio-frequency identification (RFID) sensor wireless signals. It utilizes a signal mapping approach in combination with a tailored pose-graph simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) algorithm. Evaluation results of a field-extracted pipe sample from Sydney Water’s distribution network show that the proposed approach is capable of localizing the robot within 2.5 cm accuracy in a 50-m equivalent pipe with an unknown UHF-RFID distribution. The proposed approach outperformed other reported similar work in the literature.