A proposal to use robots for video inspections of Peachtree City’s sewer collection pipes will be considered Monday night by the city’s Water and Sewer Authority.
The benefit is that the robots will allow for the entire sewer system to be inspected over a 15-month period, officials have said. Currently, WASA employs a contractor for video sewer inspections of a much smaller scale.
The authority meeting starts at 6:30 p.m. and is open to the public. The meetings are convened at WASA headquarters located at 1127 Ga. Highway 74 just south of the city’s Baseball and Soccer Complex.
WASA uses video inspections to determine whether pipes are damaged or need to be cleaned out. Tree roots, for example, are common culprits for blocked sewer pipes.
The cost of going with Redzone Robotics is $178,256 a year for seven years at zero percent interest. That is comparable to what WASA has been spending annually for the much smaller scale manual video inspections, officials have said.
If approved, the net result will be a “Google Earth” type archive of video inspections and various data about the sewer system. The software will allow for video to be accessed with a changeable viewpoint so the user can see inside the pipe in a number of different directions.
The information will reside on individual computers and will not require an Internet connection, so it can be deployed on laptops in the field, for example, Redzone officials said.
The robots would only be going in WASA’s collection system, not into any privately-owned lines leading to the system.
Another upshot for using the robots is there will be no need for traffic control on surface streets, since it’s just a matter of lowering the semi-autonomous robots into the sewer system and letting them do their work. Redzone officials said.
WASA also will have the opportunity to halt funding for the project in future years, but the penalty will be a need to migrate all of the data to another software platform within 30 days before Redzone deletes it from its servers.
