CHECKING sewers for leaks, cracks and blockages is a task most of us wouldn’t
touch with a bargepole. But soon we won’t need to, as a team at the University
of Manchester has come up with a way to teach robots how to do it.
An engineer will normally inspect a sewer, or alternatively, send a
remote-controlled video camera trundling through it and watch the pictures above
ground. Either way, it’s time consuming and unpleasant. But Stephen Marsland,
Ulrich Nehmzow and Jonathan Shapiro at Manchester’s department of computer
science say that a robot designed to spot anything out of the…
