Problem Solved - Hong Kong Water
I got a call from Hong Kong Water. They are the people who inspect the sewers and storm drains in the city of Hong Kong. They found me on You Tube. They needed an Inspection Robot to inspect the sewer mains. According to their drawings, the access points were manholes, 880mm in diameter so the robot had to fit in the manhole.
What they wanted was a large industrial Inspection platform which they could use to record high-definition video of the inside of storm drains and sewer lines to look for signs of damage. A daunting challenge indeed! I decided to use the SMB (Super Megabot) as a base and mounted a waterproof GoPro camera to a pan tilt Mechanism on the top deck. I protected the camera mechanism with a welded steel roll cage and added some very bright off-road LED Lights.
The robot shipped out and was received without any trouble but when the engineers brought the Inspection Robot out into the field, they realized they had a problem… What showed as 880mm on the drawings was actually 660mm - The robot didn’t fit into the manhole access points… It wasn’t my fault, but I decided to help them out.
Luckily, when I designed the Robot, I included modularity in the design. The SMB has two motor mounting position and can accept different wheel/tire sizes. I needed to reduce the overall width of the Inspection robot by 220mm or 8.66” After some quick calculations, I advised them to move the motors to their inboard mounting positions and bolt on a new set of smaller tires which I would send them. They made the retrofit in Hong Kong and the system worked perfectly – much to everyone’s relief…