Multi-Sensor Inspection
Multi-sensor inspection (MSI) is an inspection approach that uses several sensors or sensing technologies at once to assess the condition, integrity, or performance of an object, system, or environment. Combining different types of sensor data gives a more accurate and complete picture than any single sensor could provide.
Each sensor captures something the others miss. A camera shows what a surface looks like, while other sensors can measure shape, distance, or material properties. Software aligns the readings by position and time and analyzes them together.
In wastewater and pipeline work, a multi-sensor inspection robot can travel through a pipe capturing video alongside other measurements, so analysts can see both visible defects and changes in the pipe's shape or condition in one dataset.
Multi-sensor inspection differs from single-sensor inspection, such as video-only pipe inspection, which shows the surface but cannot measure what the camera cannot see.