Enter your email to receive our weekly newsletter. A small army of robots is infiltrating the sewers in our central cities. Sewer robots have since lit up over 900 kilometers of pipes across Japan. In contrast, Robotics Cabling's robots simply finish a job that humans start.
Operators manually pull one or two custom cables through the pipes.
Each of these cables carries 216 hair-thin glass strands sheathed in Kevlar and polyethylene to seal out hungry rodents and corrosive sewer gases. The robots then staple the cables to the pipe roof. Robot designers, on the other hand, are tackling the even smaller pipes and the tight turns that lead to individual homes. Freelance writer Peter Fairley is a former editor of Chemical Week magazine. He lives in Toronto.