Abstract
With regard to the current sewer pipe inspection technology, all commercial robots are completely tele-operated, usually via a tether cable, by a human operator. In addition, current sewer inspection robots have a poor mobility function to pass any kind of pipe-bends such as curves and junctions so that those robots are only capable to move into the straight pipes. Inspecting the sewage pipes using the state of the arts inspection methods by the current robots is costly, mostly human cost, and not fast enough to check and inspect the amount of sewage pipes will grow stronger than it has actually happened, especially in Japan. We have been working on sewer pipe inspection robots called "KANTARO" which have the specific mechanical structure to move on curves and junctions with simple motion control algorithm. In this paper we propose a self-localization method using passive arms attached on the both sides of robot.
