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12 <h2><a href='
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>MIT Graduate Creates Robot That Swims Through Pipes To Find Out If They're Leaking (fastcompany.com)
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13 <div class='details'
>(Thursday September
06,
2018 @
11:
30PM (BeauHD)
14 from the leak-detecting dept.)
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17 A
28-year-old MIT graduate named You Wu spent six years [
1]developing a low-cost robot designed to find leaks in pipes early , both to save water and to avoid bigger damage later from bursting water mains.
"Called Lighthouse, the robot looks like a badminton birdie,
" reports Fast Company.
"A soft
'skirt
' on the device is covered with sensors. As it travels through pipes, propelled by the flowing water, suction tugs at the device when there
's a leak, and it records the location, making a map of critical leaks to fix.
" From the report:
<br/><br/>> MIT doctoral student You Wu spent six years developing the design, building on research that earlier students began under a project sponsored by a university in Saudi Arabia, where most drinking water comes from expensive desalination plants and around a third of it is lost to leaks. It took three years before he had a working prototype. Then Wu got inspiration from an unexpected source: At a party with his partner, he accidentally stepped on her dress. She noticed immediately, unsurprisingly, and Wu realized that he could use a similar skirt-like design on a robot so that the robot could detect subtle tugs from the suction at each leak. Wu graduated from MIT in June, and is now launching the technology through a startup called [
2]WatchTower Robotics . The company will soon begin pilots in Australia and in Cambridge, Massachusetts. One challenge now, he says, is creating a guide so water companies can use the device on their own.
<br/><br/><br/><br/>[
1] https://www.fastcompany.com/
90232363/this-leak-seeking-robot-just-won-the-u-s-james-dyson-award
<br/><br/>[
2] http://watchtowerrobotics.com/