Investigating the survey instrument for the underground pipeline with inertial sensor and dead reckoning method

To survey deep-buried and non-metallic pipelines without excavation, a pipeline survey instrument composed of a data collection and data processing part is developed. The data collection part is composed of a walking machine, a nine-axis micro-electro-mechanical system inertial measurement unit (MEMS-IMU) installed on the walking machine, odometers based on Hall magnetic switches, and a control/data storage circuit, while data processing is executed on the personal computer, where the attitude and trajectory are acquired with the complementary filter and dead reckoning on the collected data. Key technologies include the following: (1) the gyro-bias is estimated with the parking mode when there is no angular motion excitation; (2) a magnetometer is introduced to assist MEMS-IMU tracking azimuth changes; (3) calibration based on ellipsoid fitting is designed for magnetometers and accelerometers without any references; (4) stretching and rotation on calculated trajectory are executed with position information of both pipeline ends. Test results on a pipeline of 104 m constructed on the ground show that the maximum error on the lateral direction is 0.13 m and the height is 0.06 m, while the mean errors are -0.04 m and -0.001 m, respectively.