Micro-Inertial-Aided High-Precision Positioning Method for Small-Diameter PIG Navigation

摘要

Pipeline leakage or explosion has caused huge economic losses, polluted the environments and threatened the safety of civilian’s lives and assets, which even caused negative influences to the society greatly. Fortunately, pipeline inspection gauge (PIG) could accomplish the pipeline defect (corrosions, cracks, grooves, etc.) inspection effectively and meanwhile to localize these defects precisely by navigation sensors. The results are utilized for pipeline integrity management (PIM) and pipeline geographic information system construction. Generally, the urban underground pipeline presents with small-diameter and complicated-distribution properties, which are of great challenges for the pipeline defects positioning by PIG. This chapter focuses on in-depth research of the high-precision positioning method for small-diameter PIG navigation. In the beginning, the problems and system errors statement of MEMS SINS-based PIG are analyzed step by step. Then, the pipeline junction (PJ) identification method based on fast orthogonal search (FOS) is studied. After that, a PIG positioning system that comprises of micro-inertial/AGM/odometer/PJ is proposed, and also the application mechanism of extended Kalman filter and its smoothing technology on PIG navigation system is researched to improve the overall positioning precision for the small-diameter PIG. Finally, the proposed methods and research conclusions are verified by the indoor wheel robot simulation platform.