  Incident in water distribution systems (WDS) cause water loss and water
contamination that requires the utility managers to assess the condition of
pipelines in a timely manner. However, pipelines are long and access to all
parts of it is a chal-lenging task; current in-pipe robots have the limitations
of short-distance inspection and inability to operate in-service networks. In
this work, we improve the design of our previously developed in-pipe robot and
analyze the effect of line pressure and relative velocity on the robot during
operation with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. An extreme
scenario for robot operation is defined and we estimate the minimum inspection
distance for the robot with one turn of battery charge that is 5400m. A
multi-phase motion controller is proposed that ensures reliable motion at
straight and non-straight configurations of pipeline and also stabilized
configuration with zero velocity at junctions. We also propose a localization
and navigation method based on particle filtering and combine it with the
proposed multi-phase motion controller. In this method, the map of the
operation is provided to the robot and the robot localizes itself based on the
map and the particle filtering method. Furthermore, the robot navigates
different configurations of pipelines by switching between different phases of
the motion controller algorithm that is performed by the particle filter
algorithm. The experiment and simulation results show that the robot along with
the navigation shows a promising solution towards long-distance inspection of
pipelines by in-pipe robots.
