Rob Worley
Papers
12
Total Citations
202
H-Index
6
About
Rob Worley is a robotics and autonomous systems researcher whose work focuses on a critical infrastructure challenge: enabling robots to intelligently inspect buried water and sewer pipe networks. His most cited contribution, a 2021 review of Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) for pipe inspection robots (85 citations), established a comprehensive foundation for the field and highlighted the growing importance of autonomous monitoring in smart cities. Worley has made significant advances in solving the localization problem in GPS-denied, feature-sparse pipe environments, developing novel acoustic echo-localization techniques, pose graph optimization methods, and hybrid metric-topological particle filter algorithms. His acoustic sensing work is particularly innovative, using sound reflections to detect, localize, and classify pipe faults — work that has accumulated over 70 citations across multiple papers. More recently, he has advanced visual SLAM approaches that exploit the cylindrical geometry of pipes to reduce scale drift. Collectively, Worley's research addresses a genuinely difficult robotics problem with real-world implications for infrastructure maintenance, and his growing citation record reflects increasing recognition of his contributions to autonomous robotic inspection systems.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1
- 2Acoustic Echo-Localization for Pipe Inspection Robots30 citations · 2020
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- 7Acoustic Echo Sensing for Robot Localization in Buried Pipe Networks6 citations · 2024
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- 9Hybrid Metric‐Topological Localization for Robots in Pipe Networks4 citations · 2024
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