“X-RAY specs” that show where pipes and cables are buried should help stop road maintenance gangs accidentally cutting power lines or knocking a hole in water mains.
As well as disrupting services to homes and businesses, these accidents cost lives. In the past decade, 86 people were killed and 3000 were injured in Britain by digging up live power cables. Engineers at Nottingham University are developing an “augmented reality” system that shows maintenance engineers what’s lurking beneath their feet. The system comprises a virtual reality headset, plus a backpack containing a GPS receiver, a 3D imaging computer and a battery. To work out where to dig, a worker dons the headset. The computer then uses GPS to work out where they are to the nearest 10 metres, and fine-tunes its position by working out its distance from a radio base station. It then superimposes 3D video images of the buried pipes and cables onto the scene the worker is seeing.
Gethin Roberts of the university’s Institute of Engineering Surveys says many people find it hard to visualise where things are just from looking at a map. “This new system can overcome this. The worker can look at the ground, and X really will mark the spot,” he says.
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