(Thursday September 06, 2018 @11:30PM (BeauHD)
from the leak-detecting dept.)
A 28-year-old MIT graduate named You Wu spent six years 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: 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 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.