A Robotic Cable Inspection System

Roland Piquepaille writes "In a short article, Popular Science reports that researchers at the University of Washington have built a robotic cable inspection system. This system should help utility companies to maintain their networks of subterranean cables. The robot, dubbed Cruiser, is about 4-feet-long and is designed like a snake. When it detects an anomaly on an underground cable, it sends a message to a human operator via Wi-Fi. The first field tests took place in New Orleans in December 2006. But a commercial version should not be available before 2012."

A biological particle accellerator cleaner

[MichaelCrawford]

From time to time they need to cut and re-weld the vacuum beam pipe in the CERN particle accellerator. This can leave iron filings in the tube that could screw up the beam. I was told when I spent the Summer of '93 there that the way they clean the pipe out is to attach a brush to the tail of a weasel and have him run down the tube.

And while offtopic, definitely funny is that one time after they'd sealed the tube back up, they couldn't get the beam to go through a particular section. Investigators found a couple beer bottles spaced several meters apart inside the tube.

Re:Hmm...

[markov_chain]

How about multi-tentacled models?

holy #$%& a subject!

[blhack]

I think that this is using the term 'robot' a bit loosely. This isn't really any more of a robot than the wireless thermometer that I have outside my kitchen. If you could drop the thing on top of a cable, and it would just wander all over(under?) the city looking for bad cables until you called it home; if it had the ability to make a (psuedo-)decision on what to do next based on its surroundings....THAT would be a robot.

I guess that IMHO a robot should be a machine that could do something that would seem "random" to a casual observer.

What will happen when it hits a wiretap?

[Anonymous Coward]

We all know that the US (and others) use submarines to install permanent wiretaps onto these cables. What will the robot do when it reaches one? Will it have the ability to discretely move around the tap? Otherwise I doubt that it will ever see the light of day. However the clever designers know this and they therefore know they are guaranteed to be bought out by a US company for an excellent price (see Skype).