Pipeline Leak Identification Emergency Robot Swarm (PLIERS)

As cities continue to expand, there has been a substantial increase in demand for factories and sewage systems, which in turn necessitated the need for maintaining the pipeline systems involved. These are typically difficult, dangerous, and expensive to investigate manually by humans, and therefore the use of automated robots is crucial to identifying cracks. Therefore, we propose PLIERS (Pipeline Leak Identification Emergency Robot Swarm). PLIERS is a system consisting of a swarm of robots that are used to investigate pipes for any cracks while communicating with one another as well as a server system. The robots are mounted with cameras to collect images of these cracks, which are then analyzed using a machine learning algorithm by the server to detect and confirm the cracks and their severity.