After the flood receded, some underground drainage pipes were clogged with sludge. What to do if you cannot find the clogged points? Don’t worry. Here came the pipe robots. These “helpers” dredging underground drainage pipes in Jiangbei District saved over 60% of costs compared to the traditional manual operation, according to the Jiangbei District Commission of Housing and Urban-Rural Development on August 26.

Robots are used to dredge underground drainage pipes in Jiangbei District, Chongqing, on August 26, 2020.

Workers opened a maintenance hole cover in the Jiangbeicheng Underpass, and dropped a pipe robot, which is 25 centimeters wide and 30 centimeters high, in the drainage pipe network. A tablet was used to control the movement of the robot in pipes and receive the real-time images sent back by it. When blockages stopped the robot, workers took it back and sent it down from another maintenance hole 20 meters away to make another detection.

In just half a day, the robot had entered 20 odd maintenance holes, finding out clogged points in about 400-meter-long pipes under the underpass and nearby areas and confirming their respective severity.

This pipe robot is one of the many Internet of Things facilities of “Jiangbei District Smart Drainage System 2.0” platform, which allowed the District to concentrate on repairing and dredging the drainage system, rather than assign many people to monitor sites for observation and information collection. This significantly improved the efficiency of drainage in Jiangbei District.