As cleanup efforts continue in southwest Detroit following a recent devastating water main break, a tech startup is working on a solution that could prevent future incidents. Motmot, a company located in the Newlab building on the Michigan Central Station campus, is developing an AI-powered device called the Motbot, designed to inspect municipal water lines.
Smith shows what the next prototype of the Motbot will look like.
Over the past few years, a team of engineers at Motmot has been working on the Motbot, an autonomous underwater robot equipped with advanced technology for inspecting the inside of water pipes. “So really, this is an inspection tool. We call it an autonomous underwater robot. What we do is we put it directly in a water main pipe and inspect. It has a camera, so it’s able to look at the inside of a pipe. It has acoustics, so it’s able to listen for any leaks,” explained Elliot Smith, CEO and co-founder of Motmot.
Smith is hopeful that the Motbot can assist cities in reducing the number of water main breaks. He draws from his prior experience as a municipal engineering consultant. “In my past life, I was a municipal engineering consultant. So, I helped represent a lot of cities and counties as their direct engineer. What I noticed is we were planning for all these really big, multimillion-dollar projects with a lot of guesswork,” Smith said.
Because of this, the Motbot has been in development since 2022 and is currently being tested in labs at Michigan State University and the University of Michigan. Motmot has also been working with MSU’s water works department, which decommissioned 1,000 feet of water main pipe for the device to be tested.
At this stage of development, the Motbot moves autonomously using the flow of water and propellers. The team is now working on a second prototype that will allow the device to navigate turns inside the pipes. “This is just a 3D printout and this will be the first time you can start taking a turn in the system,” Smith said. “So, you totally change the game where you can go from maybe a 5-mile straight inspection to, if you can make that turn, now you’re doing hundreds of miles for an inspection.”
Smith emphasizes the importance of providing cities with affordable access to monitoring methods before major failures occur. “What our true mission is, it’s about public education. It’s about people realizing there’s a whole world underneath our feet that we truly just take for granted,” Smith said. “Our systems are old. Our systems are really old. So, we need to make sure we’re taking care of our most critical assets.”
Motmot plans to officially launch its pilot program in June in East Lansing. The company has already generated significant interest from other cities and hopes to expand the technology’s usage soon. More information about the technology can be found on the company website.
