by Lei Shi, Jaime Valls Miro, Jeya Rajalingam, Roger Wood and Dammika Vitanage
Centre for Autonomous Systems, University of Technology, Sydney, NSW, Australia
Sydney Water, Sydney, NSW, Australia
Conference:
Ozwater 2016
Date of Conference:
10 – 12 May 2016
Conference Location :
Melbourne, Australia
Abstract
Asset management and pipe condition assessment (CA) activities in the water industry usually require locating buried pipes accurately to minimise inspection and maintenance costs. A typical challenge in practice is locating an anomaly detected by an in-pipe inspection tool from aboveground in order to dig up a pipe for replacement. Accumulated in-pipe errors over longer distances in particular can easily lead to selecting the wrong pipe section for further investigation or exhumation. In fact, some in-pipe CA providers suggest utility personnel dig up a number of sections of pipe around the suggested location so as to ensure finding the target section. In this paper we propose a mechanism to accurately correlate a 3D pipeline profile built from GPS surveying results of aboveground pipeline features with in-pipe chainage distances, so as to establish an accurate link between above-ground GPS coordinates and inpipe distance measurements. This approach naturally characterises and corrects for some of the most prominent in-pipe chainage measurement errors that can lead to uncertainties about the reported location of a buried pipeline from aboveground. The detailed pipeline information can then be projected onto satellite imagery as an accurate easy-to-understand reference for efficient decision making.