DeWaLoP - Robust Pipe Joint Detection

In this paper, we describe the vision system for the DeWaLoP (Developing Water Loss Prevention) robot. The robot working environment is inside a pipe (a cylinder), which fits perfectly to the vision system, based on omni-directional cameras. By unrolling the omni-directional camera image to a panoramic image, the circular features of the pipe become linear and by adding a line tracking algorithm, it is possible to accurately detect and analyze the pipe’s joint with a simpler algorithm if compared to the state of the art, tracking circular features algorithms for the same purpose. Moreover, given the characteristics of the pipes, which have a defined length; the system takes into account the robot’s odometry. The distance traveled by the robot can be estimated by knowing the diameter of the wheels and the motor encoder’s ratio. Correlating the visual information with the robot’s odometry creates a robust pipe joint detection system.