3D Modeling of Pipeline Sections Within a Building by Means of Inertial Navigation Methods

Basic Information

Students: Ivan Kropotov, Jesse Lukkarinen, Aaro Reijola, Markus Säynevirta

Project manager: Markus Säynevirta

Instructor: Pekka Forsman

Starting date: 20.1.2023

Completion date: 6.6.2023

Abstract

Figure 1: The Lord 3DMGX5-AHRS Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU).

Maintenance and repair work in buildings often requires accurate information about the locations of ventilation shafts and water pipelines inside structures of the building. Without precise knowledge of the locations of these systems, maintenance and repair work becomes a time-consuming and complex process. To locate these essential systems the workers will often need to rely on invasive methods, like exploratory digging, or employ cumbersome and imprecise traditional techniques, such as radars and metal detectors.  

To address this issue, our project aimed to develop an alternative method for mapping the ventilation shafts and water pipelines by using a single inertial measurement unit (IMU) that would travel through these structures. The key question was to evaluate the ability of the IMU to track its path accurately enough for it to be useful in building a 3D model of the structures of interest. 

We tested numerous methods of estimating position from the inertial measurements ranging from classical dead reckoning based on integration of measured accelerations to various extended Kalman filter (EKF) based estimation algorithms. We also tried methods that incorporate other known data, like the starting and ending points of a pipeline, for compensating for the errors that arise during the position estimation. 

The primary outcome of our project is that using accelerations measured by MEMS (Microelectromechanical Systems) sensors for position estimation is not viable with the specific sensors and algorithms we examined. However, we found that the IMU's orientation can be tracked quite accurately. This orientation data can be integrated into a position estimation solution, given that an accurate measurement of the traveled distance is available.

Appendices

Appendix 1: Project Final Report

Appendix 2: Business Case Analysis

Appendix 3: Final Gala Poster