Our culvert team has an interesting "team member" to help them inspect some of the nearly 40,000 culverts throughout the state. Well, technically it's a robot, but "Deep Trekker" is so useful, it practically has its own desk now.
Beneath Oregon's 8,000 miles on the state highway system are culverts in all sizes - from small, corrugated pipes to big concrete box culverts. Their main job: move water from one side of the road to the other. Deep Trekker's main job: keep our construction costs down by providing accurate video inspections for the pre-design team. That's essential because anything that comes up on-site and after bid is pretty expensive.
Deep Trekker mainly looks for structural defects to our culverts, but sometimes it finds other surprises. Anyone who has needed to shimmy into a tight space can understand not wanting to come face-to-face with a porcupine or rattlesnake. Deep Trekker however, will just beep ✨ boop✨ along and politely retreat for friendly critter crossing.
Deep Trekker has become such a valuable team member, that we're looking at other types of robotics or features like laser profiling or even a submersible version for coastal inspections.