Phase II year
2016
(last award dollars: 2019)
Phase II Amount
$1,993,906
Relocating overhead utilities to the subsurface can effectively reduce safety hazards on national highways and other aboveground living spaces. A typical underground space is, however, congested with buried utilities especially in an urban environment. The recordings of those underground utilities are, furthermore, often inaccurate, incomplete, out of date, or even entirely missing as a result of insufficient surveying methodologies and inadequate as-built recording practices. Consequently, the utility construction industry is plagued by aggravating accidents caused by mechanical damages to buried utilities during horizontal directional drilling (HDD) and other construction related activities. In order to address these technical challenges, we have been developing the Robotic Utility Mapping and Installation System (RUMI), a comprehensive robotic solution that improves the safety and productivity of the underground utility construction. The overarching objective of the Phase II effort is to develop RUMI-2, the second robot prototype that realizes the innovative technologies conceptualized in Phase I, and demonstrate its capabilities in a relevant environment. The expected contribution of RUMI-2 to the utility industry is: 1) Accurate robotic 3D utility mapping and digitalization; 2) Precise robotic drill-head tracking with multiple magnetic dipole transceivers; and 3) Effective robotic HDD cross-bore/obstacle avoidance.
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Today, urban underground spaces are shared by multiple utility companies for laying power lines, gas lines, water supply/sewage pipes, fiber-optic cables, etc. The recordings of such buried utilities are often erroneous, inadequate, or outdated (if they ever exist) due to insufficient surveying methodologies and as-built recording practices. Ability to accurately locate and provide awareness of buried utility structure is therefore urgently needed by not only those utility companies but also other stakeholders of the underground spaces such as city planners, construction companies, asset management/maintenance authorities, archaeologists, etc. To address this problem, IAI has developed the Robotic Utility Mapping and Inspection System (RUMI) whose demonstrated capabilities include: 1) Autonomous area inspection; 2) Integrated subsurface and aboveground data collection and 3D visualization; 3) Augmented reality projection; and 4) Dynamic asset information retrieval. In this effort, IAI will develop the next generation of the RUMI system—specifically being enhanced for practical use in operational environments. Some of the notable enhancements include: 1) Improvement of the situational awareness; 2) Extension of the asset management subsystem to the Building Information Modeling (BIM) framework; 3) Improvement of the autonomous mapping methods; and 4) Ruggedization of the robotic system.