A new £4.2m national infrastructure research project led by researchers at University of Leeds is going to build robots to fix potholes, and drones to repair light fixtures.
The funding for the project is part of the overall £21 million funding for ‘Engineering Grand Challenges’ research, which aims to tackle some of the major challenges facing science and engineering. Funded by Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), researchers seek to design, develop, test and ultimately deploy small robots and drones capable of not only identifying problems with utility pipes, street lights and roads, but also capable of fixing them autonomously.
“From ground-breaking work with robotics to advanced air-flow simulators, this investment will help tackle our aging water infrastructure and air pollution in cities to improve the lives of millions of people around the world,” said Universities and Science Minister, Jo Johnson.
With three major ideas “Perch and Repair”, “Perceive and Patch” and “Fire and forget”, researchers intend to develop drones capable of perching on branches of trees and on buildings to search and fix problems with street lights; robots capable of autonomously inspecting, diagnosing, repairing and preventing potholes in roads; and robots capable of operating indefinitely within live utility pipes performing inspection, repair, metering and reporting tasks respectively.
“We can support infrastructure which can be entirely maintained by robots and make the disruption caused by the constant digging up the road in our cities a thing of the past”, says Professor Phil Purnell, from the School of Civil Engineering, who is leading the research team.
“Our robots will undertake precision repairs and avoid the need for large construction vehicles in the heart of our cities. We will use the unique capabilities of our robotic facility to make new, more capable robots”, Dr Rob Richardson, director of the National Facility for Innovative Robotic Systems at the University said.
University of Leeds is leading the team working on the project with members from some of the UK’s other top universities including Birmingham, Southampton and UCL, with Nottingham, Sheffield, Oxford and Imperial as supporting partners.
The project brings together expertise from across the University, including the Schools of Civil Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Electronic and Electrical Engineering, Computing, as well as from Leeds University Business School, the School of Environment and the Institute for Transport Studies.
While there is human labour available, why use robots. It would be better to invest that money into investigating and preventing potholes from appearing in the first place.