Grant: Engage Plus Grants Program

The proposed six month Engage Plus project will allow us to continue to help Pure Technologies develop a low-weight and high resolution custom laser triangulation sensor for mounting on the pedals of a pipe inspection robot to inspect the joint condition in water pipes. In the past six months, the NSERC Engage project with Pure Technologies has led to a circuit board that has been built and programmed based on field-programmable gate array (FPGA) to collect and store signals from a number of sensors simultaneously. Based on the FPGA board, inertial measurement unit (IMU) will also be integrated onto the inspection robot.The technical challenges include development of a low weight and high resolution custom laser triangulation sensor for integrating with a pipe inspection robot to inspect joints in water pipes, and processing of the stored data off-line to estimate the gap width between pipes at their joints. Laser triangulation sensors are widely used to handle noncontact, high-speed dimensional inspection. There are several off-the-shelf laser triangulation sensors commercially available, but the existent products are either not for underwater usage or too bulky to integrate with a pipe inspection robot. A custom laser triangulation sensor is to be developed in the proposed project for integration with water pipe inspection robot pedals. In addition, a circuit board will be developed to provide enough storage capacity for collecting and storing data from multiple laser triangulation sensors simultaneously, before the collected data is transferred and analyzed on an off-line computer.With the participation of a university professor, a postdoctoral fellow, and two engineers of Pure Technologies who have accumulated extensive hands-on experience with water pipe inspection, the project will synergistically integrate academia and industry expertise, leading to technology advancement. Benefits are expected through the expansion of Pure Technologies' water pipe inspection business and the training capacity of the applicant's research group.