Wayne State’s Abolmaali brings robots

Ali Abolmaali has been dean of Wayne State’s College of Engineering for only two months, and already, the former chair of the Civil Engineering Department at the University of Texas at Arlington is bringing his research to Midtown.To get more news about Robots as a Service, you can visit glprobotics.com official website.

“I have a team of 15, led by senior program manager, Sara Ridenour, to transfer some projects and secure new projects for Wayne State in Michigan,” Abolmaali said.

The Abolmaali team determines the remaining service life of pipelines through robotic inspection and artificial intelligence research, which can be as successful in Michigan as it has been in the Lone Star state. Abolmaali has secured more than $38 million in governmental grants and fundraising for his research projects including financing to inspect and predict the remaining service life of existing sewer pipeline systems throughout the Dallas/Fort Worth area.

The history of water supply and sanitation systems in the United States dates back to the 1800s when large cities built pipelines out of brick and mortar. As technology advanced over the years, so too has pipeline materials; however, only recently, have methods been developed to inspect the more than 800,000 miles of buried public sewer pipes that transverse the U.S. landscape.
Widely considered a pioneer in underground systems, Abolmaali, who has conducted several high-profile structural failure investigations for the National Transportation Safety Board, built a robot prototype to inspect wear and tear on pipelines and save cities millions in unnecessary repair and maintenance costs.

“We built robots that took us four years to complete in different stages,” said Abolmaali, who investigated the Boston tunnel and Minneapolis bridge collapses. “Now, our robots are considered to be state-of-the-art in capturing advanced lidar and sonar data to be fed into artificial intelligence algorithm developed by my team. The robotic inspection capability coupled with artificial intelligence algorithm will form the research enterprise that we are bringing to Wayne State, which will be unique in the nation with no other universities with similar capabilities.”

Now possessing five robots, the Abolmaali team inspects pipes with flow (sewer lines) or no flow (gravity or pressure lines) for structural defects and damages. The robots are equipped with lidar, sonar, panoramic 360 video camera, and a geographic information system (GIS) used to display data related to its location and where problems are found.