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Coming soon to your plumbing Power Plumbing Snake
By Kelsey D. Atherton | Published Dec 15, 2015 9:25 PM EST
What if it was possible to weld pipes from the inside? While not necessary for all welding, sometimes there are metal tubes that need repair, and no good way to get to them other than going inside. For tubes that are too small for humans, repairing them means extensive work getting to them from the outside. What if, instead, we could send robots down the tubes, and have them weld with laser?
This snake robot, made by OC Robotics in collaboration with TWI Ltd, was built to see whether such a machine could work. Plenty of snakebots already exist, doing everyything from rescue work to surgery to industrial machining, but tragically few of them use lasers. From OC Robotics:
Here it is using the laser:
Seems to be a success! Watch the LaserPipe snake robot in action below:
Kelsey D. Atherton is a military technology journalist who has contributed to Popular Science since 2013. He covers uncrewed robotics and other drones, communications systems, the nuclear enterprise, and the technologies that go into planning, waging, and mitigating war.
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