The little ‘mouse’ that keeps CERN running

The Large Hadron Collider located at CERN, on the border between France and Switzerland, has 27 km of underground tunnels where particles are accelerated to almost the speed of light, but keeping a machine of this size running is no easy task.

Inside, there are extremely narrow pipes through which the particle beams pass. These pipes operate under extreme conditions, at temperatures close to -271ºC, almost absolute zero, and in an ultra-high vacuum environment. Any small deformation or failure in these components can compromise extremely delicate scientific experiments.

The problem is that inspecting these structures manually is a slow and costly process. often requiring entire sections of the accelerator to be dismantled just to check for a small defect. To solve this challenge, engineers at the UK Atomic Energy Authority's Race Robotics Centre developed a very curious robot, a small device just 20 cm long nicknamed PipeINEER. Due to its elongated and agile shape, many already compare it to a robotic mouse.

The robot was designed to move autonomously inside the collider's pipes, passing through spaces just 3.7 cm wide. During the inspection, it captures high-resolution images of each module of the accelerator's internal structure. These images are analysed by artificial intelligence algorithms trained with real data from the LHC itself.

The goal is to identify small deformations or anomalies before they become major problems. PipeINEER was also designed to travel up to 6 km on a single battery charge, performing long automatic inspection missions. If the system detects a fault, the robot automatically returns to its starting point and reports precisely where the problem is within the collider structure.

And this little robot reveals something curious about the future of science, because as human machines become increasingly larger and more complex, sometimes the best solution is not to build something even bigger, but something extremely small and intelligent, small enough to explore places where no one else can go.

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