Project Motivation

The number of dengue cases in Singapore has been on the rise over the past few years. Even though there is a comprehensive nationwide campaign to eliminate the Aedes mosquito, which is the main mosquito vector of dengue, dengue remains endemic in Singapore. This is because there are still many areas in our urban environment where the Aedes mosquito can breed such as covered drains in our housing estates which may have stagnant water. As many sections of such drains are inaccessible, it is difficult for town council and pest control workers to inspect them and deploy control measures such as spraying of oil and sprinkling of BTI pellets.

Design

To improve the productivity and effectiveness of current dengue prevention measures, a robotic drain crawler was designed in this project. It has the ability to inspect hard-to-reach areas in drains, detect presence of stagnant water pools, and disperse BTI pellets into the water pools – tasks that are very challenging or near-impossible for human workers to perform. The robot has a track-based locomotion system with angled wheels to enable it to transverse the curved surfaces of a drain easily. It uses a LiDAR to recognise its location along a drain, and employs computer vision with a machine learning algorithm to detect stagnant water pools along the drain. When a water pool is detected, the robot automatically deploys BTI pellets into the water using a rotary dispensing mechanism.

The robot has been co-developed with the Jurong-Clementi Town Council and is currently undergoing further work for potential pilot testing and deployment in the future.