In an effort to reduce costs and speed up the process of inspecting water towers, the eastern Iowa city of Cedar Rapids has turned to using remote-operated vehicles.
According to an article from Radio Iowa, ROVs will enable a specialized team to inspect the two-million gallon tanks for flaking and rust spots using a different process than they used previously. The old process involved team members having to climb up to the top of the tank to place a raft into it, loading several people onto the raft and then slowly draining the water out of the tank so that crew members can see the inside of the tank as they descend.
As described by Megan Murphy, a spokeswoman for the Cedar Rapids utilities department, the ROV is "basically a little submarine that is remote-controlled and has a video camera and a light on it so they can capture the inside of the tank.” The process will now involve fewer people with "someone on top of the tank to lower the little submarine in and someone at the bottom with the remote control taking video."
There is also no longer a need to drain all the water, as the robot is disinfected before being placed into the tank. Even more beneficial is the fact that inspections of water towers take less than 24 hours with ROVs, as opposed to the previous raft method which took five to seven days. The price is also half the cost of the raft method.
The ROV process will be first tried out at the Wilson Avenue water tank in Cedar Rapids on Tuesday.
On the topic of robots and water, the U.K. National Oceanography Centre recently announced that it is creating ocean-based robotic vehicles that will be used to conduct marine research over lengthy periods of time. The Long Endurance Marine Unmanned Vehicles, which will operate more like boats than submarines, will use sensors to obtain information from above and below the ocean's surface, and satellite navigation to communicate the information back to the operations center. The vehicles are expected to be fully operational by year's end.
