The busy street in the city, cars waiting for the green light, pedestrians crossing the street: nobody is aware that at the same time a beam of light cuts through the darkness and startles the underground "inhabitants", searching for potential damages or leaks. With more than 500.000 kilometers of sewers in Germany alone, it is obvious that modern day sewer inspection and renovation can’t be done from street level. Inspection robots, driven by FAULHABER, are getting the job done. Motors from FAULHABER are used for camera control, tool functions and the wheel drive.
Since in the sewage sector all tools have to meet very high standards of reliability and performance, the drives on such sewer robots have to be extremely robust. Depending on the type of service, they vary in sizes, tooling, and other specific features. The devices for pipes with small diameters, usually shorter house connections, are attached to a cable harness. They are moved by rolling this harness in or out, equipped only with a swiveling camera for damage analysis. The camera bracket does not require much space, which is why particularly small, yet very precise, motors are needed here. Possible options include the flat and, measuring just 12 mm, extremely short gear motors of the 1512 … SR series or even larger models of the 2619 … SR series. FAULHABER's wide range of products also includes Stepper Motors or brushless drives with diameters from 3 mm as well as the corresponding gearheads Machines mounted on carriages and equipped with multifunctional working heads are used for large pipe diameters. Such robots have long been available for horizontal and, more recently, vertical pipes.
All have one thing in common: they are powered and controlled by cables. With a range of up to 2.000 meters, the result is a cable drag of considerable weight, demanding a drive, that produces a very high torque. At the same time, they encounter obstacles that block the movement. Overload at full speed occurs regularly. Only very robust motors and gearheads are able to cope with these conditions. The FAULHABER graphite commutated CR series, the brushless power pack BP4 as well as the brushless flat series BXT in combination with our robust GPT planetary gearheads, are ideally suited for these harsh environment applications.
