Mini robots detect and fix water pipe leaks without digging
59 comments
·July 7, 2025mike_hearn
I wonder if they've validated demand with the water companies. Their website doesn't seem to talk about any successful deployments or partnerships with industry, beyond something that was getting started just as they were shutting down and which isn't robot related.
Thames Water already uses pretty hi-tech approaches to finding leaks including using underground microphones to find them via sound (with obligatory AI, of course), and then they have been trialling a chemical that can travel through the pipes and jam the leaks.
https://www.thameswater.co.uk/always-fixing/finding-leaks-wi...
https://www.aquatechtrade.com/news/urban-water/thames-water-...
https://en.gutermann-water.com/2019/09/23/thames-water-finds...
They also know all about pigs, of course. So I wonder what the researchers felt their edge was that would let their approach do better than others. It seems from a quick check like the water companies are still primarily interested in hydrophonics and how to adapt those to plastic pipes.
frankvdwaal
About a decade ago I worked at a water consultancy company (of which Thames Water happened to be a client) to build a catalogue website for pipe condition assessment technologies. Already at the time that I was building it, there were dozens of these finished products with all kinds of sensors for many sizes of pipes, be they dry or with water still flowing inside. Yes, there is some demand for these devices, but there is also a lot of technology out there already for many use cases.
All that to say: I too wonder what makes this one so special.
evrimoztamur
Is there work going on with regards to robots in filthy environments, because these guys look like they're about to get tangled up in a hairy fatberg.
I'm dealing with a clogged and nasty kitchen sink right now, and man, and these guys seem so happy to be in their laboratory test plumbing :)
yojo
Leaks are more common on the pressurized side. Which is the clean water coming in. If you have hairy fatbergs in your supply you’ve got bigger problems.
The article describes them being “dropped in at hydrants.” So I think they’re punting on the “hairier” problem of the sewer side.
Edit: okay, I kept reading and they do mention pressurized waste lines. That does seem harder, especially since you’re going to get root intrusion on old public lines.
toast0
Unpressurized sewers are often pretty leaky actually. A lot of early sewage systems have combined sanitary and storm sewers, but around the 1940s, separating santiary sewers from runoff drains became common for new systems. Even in separate systems, most sewage systems see an increase in volume during the rainy season, and it's not because people pee more when it's wet outside (maybe they do, but...). Ground water leaks into the sanitary sewers; and presumably sewage leaks out of the pipes into the ground at times. As long as the slopes are reasonable, and there is free flow, leaks aren't a big deal... but leaks and gaps do allow for root intrusion which leads to clogs. Typically municipal sewer lines are pretty deep and tend to be towards the middle of the street which makes it harder for plants to get in there, but some plants are pretty persistent.
Here's an EPA manual from 1971, Prevention and Correction of Excessive Infiltration and Inflow into Sewer Systems. The key thing here is that the goal isn't to eliminate infiltration, but to eliminate excessive infiltration; it's all tradeoffs.
Bluestein
> you have hairy fatbergs in your supply you’ve got bigger problems.
Shudder at the thought ...
amelius
> I'm dealing with a clogged and nasty kitchen sink right now
Pro tip, buy one of these: https://www.amazon.com/Einhell-Power-X-Change-Cordless-Clean...
giardini
You crazy! $220 battery and charger not included?!
I'm more a $44 guy: https://www.amazon.com/RIDGID-57043-Drain-Cleaner-Power/dp/B...
It still works during a flood or power outage!
amelius
I think I bought mine for $150 including the battery and charger. Money well spent, if you ask me (certainly cheaper than hiring a plumber). Before that I had a manual version similar to the one you linked to, but it just didn't cut it in my last case of a clogged kitchen drain.
The nice thing about the automatic version is that you can go in/out and clockwise/counterclockwise independently and with a simple switch, which makes it easy to route through complicated pipe geometries without getting stuck, and you don't even have to apply much force because the machine does that for you.
null
lumost
I'd imagine there are multiple approaches to this e.g. shredding heads which break up soft material in front of the bot, or multi-robot configurations for snaking material.
There might be an efficiency gain to be had in overall city plumbing by breaking up detritus which has gotten stuck in the pipe.
bob1029
I was observing an army of 20-25 men struggle to resolve a broken main the other day. They had to bring out a gigantic vac truck to pull the water out of the work pit fast enough to get back in there.
If you offered them the use of your robot, you would probably be at risk of bodily harm.
paddy_m
Also, fun fact about Boston (MA?) construction laws. Per block, a crew is only allowed two steel plates...
In the past year, the gas line and water main on my street has been replaced. Which has resulted in 6 excavations of the street at excruciatingly slow and loud pace with the vac truck. They excavate once to transfer each finger connection (to the houses) and attach the feeder to a temporary pipe, refilling their progress each day. Once a segment (about a city block or two) been transferred to the temporary line, they excavate again to remove the old line, refilling each day. Finally they lay the new line and connect the finger lines to it.
If you can only cover two steel plates worth of trench overnight, there isn't a chance for the gas team to coordinate with the water team.
With better laws this would have taken a 1/3rd of the excavation, possibly a 1/6th of the excavation. Since excavation and refilling were most of the work in any day, this should also have led to the same cost decrease.
I don't know the exact law or regulation, but I have heard about it from multiple sources, and do intend to being it up with city council.
mythrwy
There might be "reasons" it's like that (more hours=more money) and Fat Tony will not appreciate you bringing it up to city council.
paddy_m
The giant vac truck generally is for safe digging around other unknown utilities. Sometimes this is combined with a water jet that loosens soil, and the vac sucks up the soil and water.
If they wanted to just drain an excavation, they would use a regular trash pump (capable of handling solids/sand) and run the discharge hose to a nearby stormdrain.
idiotsecant
They've had pipeline 'pigs' for quite a while that at first we're just solid plugs separating product but have gotten to be fancier and fancier. I think a drain robot would be like that.
dardeaup
I know that the pipeline pigs existed at least as far back as the early 90s (maybe even long before then).
EvanAnderson
Pipelines are cool. I don't have any direct references to give you, but you can search-engine for some interesting stuff. I did work for a petroleum distributor years ago and got to talk people w/ pipeline experience.
An interesting anecdote I can relate is learning abut "transmix", AKA "slop". I worked on a logistics planning app (a really, really fun mix of traveling salesman and bin packing). I saw an entry for "slop" in the pricing feed from an exchange. This caught my eye and led me to talk to one of the "pipeline guys" about what "slop" might be (spoiler - it's a mix of pipeline products that happens when the product in the pipeline is changed) and why one might want to buy "slop".
bell-cot
If anyone is unfamiliar with fatbergs - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatberg
That I've heard, the best way to minimize fatbergs would be to put a hefty tax on "flushable" wipes. Unfortunately, the companies which manufacture them all know that breaking consumers' fell-good delusions (that the wipes are guilt-free flushable) would tank their sales. And politicians are always happy to let lobby-savvy corporations externalize their costs onto the public purse.
JTbane
IMO the gov't should skip the hefty tax and force them to remove the "flushable" label.
bell-cot
Tomayto, tomahto.
The important thing would be to block them from replacing "flushable" with something similarly deceiving. Ideally, they'd have to replace it with a big, scary warning label - about how flushing those wipes could stick you with a flood of backed-up sewage and/or a 5-figure plumbing or septic system repair bill.
anton-c
Are any types of those wipes actually flushable?
red-iron-pine
generally, no. if they're wet before they get used, flushing them won't fix anything.
toilet paper is designed to break down rapidly, even when compared to things like paper towels and tissues.
cinntaile
Prevention is easier. I would suggest you stop pouring oil and fat into your kitchen sink.
These are research prototype robots, they're obviously not ready for the real world yet.
evrimoztamur
Prevention is not the cure to the tragedy of the commons, we always need to be able to react. I don't pour oil down my drain, but the rest of the building does, which is how my six-meter wire won't do jack.
A laboratory environment which is devoid of any resemblance to the real world will yield you different results compared to had you designed and built first for the environments you will encounter, would you agree? And these results could have capabilities not transferrable between different environments.
I try to raise these questions in good faith: For example, are wheels the way to go at all for filthy pipe environments with many sticky and tangly hazards, or do we perhaps have to explore more snake/worm form factors? If we design for the clean environments, all the magical "cost savings for infrastructure restoration" accounting you can do will never materialize.
adrian_b
You are right, in the filthiest environments nothing else can be as performant as a worm/snake-like robot, even if such robots are inferior to those with wheels or rotary propellers in nice tidy environments.
Moreover, instead of making a robot with arms, which are useful for work, but which are an impediment for moving in a filthy environment, it is better to send multiple vermiform robots, which are designed such as after reaching their destination they are able to cooperate in such a way as to act like a robot with multiple arms (i.e. they should be able to attach to anything in the environment or to another robot with both the anterior end and the posterior end, like leeches).
the__alchemist
Idealist perspective
MangoToupe
Given the rate I see people openly advocating for disposal of oil and fat down the sink as a response to rises in rent, good luck with prevention.
mlok
I browse in landscape mode on my mobile : on this website 75% of the screen is occupied by the top banner (25%) + sticky "recommended videos" banner (50%). Amazing how they managed to get me to quit their website so quickly.
x187463
News websites, especially local news, seem to have completely missed the meeting on how to build user friendly websites. They are almost universally full of obtrusive advertising, obtuse layouts, irrelevant links, and poorly handled media players. They are really in a league of their own for bad user experience.
doublerabbit
They know the point. They don't care.
They only want money & will do so with your data.
fancyfredbot
The URL has put me off this website before I'd even opened it in a browser.
barbazoo
Same, no interest giving them any thing as little as a HTTP GET.
incognitojam
krunck
Thanks for the non-F* News site.
trebligdivad
They do seem to have gone a bit overboard on the graphics !
zubiaur
In oil and gas they have "smart pigs", which have all sorts of sensors to detect issues with pipelines.
These look much simpler, which is OK if the stakes are much lower.
maCDzP
I work in this field - below are my two cents.
I have a hard time seeing that this approach would work. The environment is very messy and there are many field tested methods that don't involve digging up the whole street. One example of such a method is pipe bursting.
There have been loads of research in using AI (neural nets etc.) to find and predict pipe bursts. But I believe simple linear regression is enough since my gut is telling me age and material is a good predictor.
Where I live there is a strong seasonality because the ground freezes over and during thawing we have a lot of leaks. This is a local issue since it depends on both weather and geological environment.
v5v3
>However, researchers at the University of Sheffield in the U.K. are working on a different approach. They've developed small robots called "Pipebots" that can travel inside water pipes to find and potentially repair leaks, all without any excavation.
Note the word 'potentially'.So the headlines is wholly wrong and click bait.
prewett
Some years ago there was a HN link about people in ancient Mesopotamia (all the way up to about 1100 AD, iirc) that had a sophisticated network of canal tunnels, and they had people that would hold their breath and swim down and repair them. This is a sort of modern version of that... Sadly, I have no idea how to find the link, it was interesting.
Bluestein
See if any of these?
- https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=3&prefix=false&qu...
presidentender
One of my favorite... solutions, I suppose, was to find a break (not a leak) in a pipe by running current through it and using some sensor (I think the vocabulary is "signal generator," but I do not know). Current does not run further, there is your break; dig and find.
When the pipe is PVC, though, current does not run through it - so what do we do? Why, pump an electrolyte solution, and run your current through that!
It's simple, but it's not done, and so the plumber friend who told me of the original solution patented it, tried to sell it, and found that potential buyers were almost offended at how easy it was. As soon as he'd describe it to people they'd almost think they came up with it themselves. So it is a valuable idea, but it is also utterly worthless.
josephkaz
This looks like the next step on from the CISBOT which is in active service in London and New York. It can crawl through live mains gas pipes and plug leaks in cast iron joints.https://cadentgas.com/about-us/a-culture-of-innovation/cisbo...
Solutions in this space almost never look "like robots". They end up looking more like https://atstrack.com/assets/images/series/seriesImages/F1200... or an arm / coil.
I worked on a robot that did precisely this in oil platforms. It had to find its way through gross, sludgy tanks to find leaks or cracks, mostly taking pictures to stream back / map environment and not using AI in the loop.
I've also worked on one for oil distillation columns.
And another one for test samples in composite manufacturing.
They all had the same problem: If you're far from the user, the absence of evidence of a leak is more likely attributable to bad sensing than good results. Far, far more likely.
And, I hate to say it, none of those actuators are going to survive contact with reality either.
Cool idea, but what you want is a snake / swimmer that feeds EOIR + radar, or a floater that screams ultrasonics the whole way through the pipe. Those _have_ been actually deployed.