How the City of Toronto is using swimming robots to keep our pipes flowing smoothly

Last year, Toronto’s oldest sewer pipe was due for inspection.

The hundred-year-old concrete pipe runs under Toronto’s high-rise towers and into Lake Ontario. It would have been dangerous – not to mention expensive – to send a dive team to inspect the pipe.

Fortunately, the city had something else in mind.

Step into the Deep Trekker Revolution, a roughly 60-pound robot controlled by a remote control much like a drone, just underwater.

The Canadian company’s robots, which come in all shapes and sizes, are used by cities and businesses to inspect sewer pipes, nuclear power plants, shipwrecks and aquaculture networks. The diving robots have special skills for different tasks, such as sonar, non-destructive testing tools and grippers.

The sonar was useful for this job as it helped navigate the murky sewer water. According to Deep Trekker, the robot was able to inspect a section of the pipe that had never been inspected before.

The city also bought the company’s smaller DTG2 robot a few years ago to inspect rainwater pipes and other similar infrastructure, said Sam Macdonald, President of Deep Trekker.

Macdonald said the DTG2 will allow the city to inspect the inside of pipes without having to block entire streets. “Instead of blocking the streets to do a pipe inspection … cities can just take out (the robot) and take off the manhole cover,” Macdonald said.

However, the DTG2 was not equipped to inspect the old pipe, through which a strong current flows. So the city bought Deep Trekker’s bigger revolution for the job. The more powerful robot also moves from side to side instead of just spinning like the DTG, Macdonald said, which gives it more maneuverability.

That November 2020 expedition found a small crack in the pipe – not a huge problem but important to know and monitor, she said.

“When they approached the defect, looked at it with the camera and the lights … they were able to carry out an inspection, take a series of still images and videos of it and use them to make a decision.”

The Deep Trekker robots were not originally built for sewer pipes. In fact, the idea first came from Macdonald’s fascination with shipwrecks.

Macdonald grew up near the Great Lakes and remembers hearing about the sunken ships at the bottom of the lakes and waterways around Pelee Passage and Tobermory.

It’s this fascination that led her to start Deep Trekker a decade ago.

“I don’t spend nearly as much time looking for shipwrecks as I thought,” said Macdonald.

For the first few years, Macdonald and his co-founders, CEO Jeff Lotz and Product Director Shawn Pette, ran the company from Lotz’s basement. That included building the robots, Macdonald said.

Today the company employs around 65 people at the Kitchener plant. It also has a subsidiary in Chile that supports its customers in growing salmon there.

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And although shipwrecks were the inspiration for the introduction of the robots, their first client used the robots to inspect salmon aquaculture nets for holes in Norway. Now the same robot can mend holes in the nets, Macdonald said.

Since then, the company has expanded into a variety of industries including energy, municipal infrastructure, defense, and film, to name a few.

Her robots inspected Toronto’s storm sewer pipes, helped a media company film hippos underwater, and swam in nuclear reactors to inspect them. Not only do they save money, but they often replace the dangerous work that dive teams typically do, Macdonald said. The robots proactively identify problems before they cause major problems.

“Getting into enclosed spaces in a diving situation is very dangerous. And that’s why it’s very expensive, ”said Macdonald.

Deep Trekker’s robots have also been used to explore shipwrecks, including efforts by Parks Canada to locate the two ships involved in the famous Franklin expedition.

Deep Trekker makes several different robots, including: the DT340, a pipe crawling robot that comes in two sizes – the smallest fits into a six-inch pipe; the DTG, an elongated basketball-sized robot with a 270-degree camera; and the Revolution, a roughly 60-pound robot that can travel up to 1,000 feet or more than 300 meters underwater. The company will launch a medium-sized remote-controlled vehicle for use between Revolution and DTG at the end of June.

The robots, which can be modified for specific purposes, are also sold to the public. Macdonald said people are buying them to use on their boats, perhaps to accompany a family member on a dive without having to dive themselves. They’ll set you back, however – the starter kit for the DTG3 costs nearly $ 6,000.

Deep Trekker technology is becoming increasingly popular for inspections like last fall in Toronto, Macdonald said because it enables municipalities and businesses to proactive scouting tours at a much lower cost than if they were done by human.

“The most interesting things we do are communities and energy because those are the things that, when it goes wrong, things really go wrong,” she said.

Macdonald expects its robots to become increasingly automated and further advance its imaging technology.

“We’re going to take over the world one robot at a time,” joked Macdonald.

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