Battery-free UHF-RFID Sensors based SLAM for In-Pipe Robot Perception

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 UHF-RFID sensor wireless signals. It utilizes a signal mapping approach in combination with a tailored pose-graph simultaneous localization and mapping algorithm. Evaluation results of a field-extracted pipe sample from Sydney Water's distribution network show the proposed approach is capable of localizing the robot within 2.5cm accuracy in a 50m equivalent pipe with an unknown UHF-RFID distribution. The proposed approach outperformed other reported similar work in the literature.