Visual mapping for natural gas pipe inspection

Validating the integrity of pipes is an important task for safe natural gas production and many other operations (e.g. refineries, sewers, etc.). Indeed, there is a growing industry of actuated, actively driven mobile robots that are used to inspect pipes. Many rely on a remote operator to inspect data from a fisheye camera to perform manual inspection and provide no localization or mapping capability. In this work, we introduce a visual odometry-based system using calibrated fisheye imagery and sparse structured lighting to produce high-resolution 3D textured surface models of the inner pipe wall. Our work extends state-of-the-art visual odometry and mapping for fisheye systems to incorporate weak geometric constraints based on prior knowledge of the pipe components into a sparse bundle adjustment framework. These constraints prove essential for obtaining high-accuracy solutions given the limited spatial resolution of the fisheye system and challenging raw imagery. We show that sub-millimeter resolution modeling is viable even in pipes which are 400 mm (16”) in diameter, and that sparse range measurements from a structured lighting solution can be used to avoid the inevitable monocular scale drift. Our results show that practical, high-accuracy pipe mapping from a single fisheye camera is within reach.