Assessing the Underworld (ATU) is a large interdisciplinary UK research project, which addresses challenges in integrated inter-asset maintenance. As assets on the surface of the ground (e.g. roads or pavements) and those buried under it (e.g. pipes and cables) are supported by the ground, the properties and processes of soil affect the performance of these assets to a significant degree. In or...

The goal of our research is to develop an autonomous robot for subsurface mapping. We are motivated by the growing need for mapping buried pipes, hazardous waste, landmines and other buried objects. Most of these are large scale mapping problems, and to manually construct subsurface maps in these cases would require a significant amount of resources. Therefore, automating the subsurface mapping...

Buried pipeline systems are commonly used to transport water, sewage, oil, natural gas and other materials. In the conterminous United States, there are about 77,109 km (47,924 miles) of crude oil pipelines, 85,461 km (53,114 miles) of refined oil pipelines and 67,898 km (42,199 miles) of natural gas pipelines (FEMA, 1991). The total length of water and sewage pipelines is not readily available...

Sustainable urban infrastructure planning and maintenance require an integrated approach that considers various assets (e.g., the ground, roads, buried pipes) their inter-linkages as a holistic system. To facilitate usage of this approach, we propose model city interdependencies, providing details on how asset properties processes affect each other. This is represented ontologies in OWL 2 Web O...

The ability to detect early signs of failure in buried pipe infrastructure is necessary facilitate the continued use ageing for delivery society’s essential services and move beyond disruptive expensive reactive maintenance repair. This paper reports detailed experiments on in-pipe ultrasound techniques assessment ground conditions around plastic pipes. Two sets ultrasonic experiment soil are p...

Buried pipes are extensively used for oil transportation from offshore platforms. Under unfavorable loading combinations, the pipe’s uplift resistance may be exceeded, which result in excessive deformations and significant disruptions. This paper presents findings a series of small-scale tests performed on buried geogrid-reinforced sands, with measured peak being to calibrate advanced numerical...

Statutory records of underground utility apparatus (such as pipes and cables) are notoriously inaccurate, so street surveys are usually undertaken before road excavation takes place to minimize the extent and duration of excavation and for health and safety reasons. This involves the use of sensors such as Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR). The GPR scans are then manually interpreted and combined ...

The task of locating buried utilities using ground penetrating radar is addressed, and a novel processing technique computationally suitable for on-site imaging is proposed. The developed system comprises a neural network classifier, a pattern recognition stage, and additional pre-processing, feature-extraction and image processing stages. Automatic selection of the areas of the radargram conta...

“Mapping the Underworld” is a large multi-disciplinary, multi-university research programme taking place in the UK, which aims to revolutionize the way we undertake streetworks. Within this programme, a number of vibration-based techniques for remotely detecting and locating buried pipes have been developed. Relying either on the direct excitation of a pipe as it comes up to the surface or exci...