Review of the State-of-the-art Sewer Monitoring and Maintenance Systems Pune Municipal Corporation - A Case Study

There is an increasing trend of using automated and robotic systems for the tasks that are hazardous or inconvenient and dirty for humans. Sewers maintenance and cleaning is such a task where robots are already being used for inspection of underground pipes for blockages and damage. This paper reviews the existing robotic systems and various platforms and algorithms along with their capabilities and limitations being discussed. A typical mid-size city in a developing country, Pune, India is selected in order to understand the concerns and identify the requirements for developing robotic systems for the same. It is found that major concern of sewers are blockages but there is not enough information on both real-time detection and removal of it with robotic systems. On-board processing with computer vision algorithms has not been efficiently utilized in terms of performance and determinations for real-world implementations of sewer robotic systems. The review highlights the available methodologies that can be utilized in developing sewer inspection and cleaning robotic systems.