Design and Development of an Inspection Robot for Oil and Gas Applications

Abstract

Pipeline or mass transport line are the chief applications which are typically involved in the oil and gas industries. After various background studies, the pipeline involved in such industries comes from a high technology design and material of use. Hence, inspection and maintenance must be done frequently to ensure the pipeline can be used in an excellent working state. The inspection on pipeline must be done before and after its maintenance. However, it is difficult to inspect within the pipe to ensure it is in good condition. Currently, various new types of technology are used for inspection purposes specifically by means of the Non-Destructive Testing, but it highly costly. Thus, this project focuses on the design and development of an inspection robot to perform a pipeline inspection. Some applications that can accommodate to the designing of a robot is that the robot is able to manoeuvre inside the pipeline wirelessly and give a visual interface while proceeding it. Therefore, this project shows the development processes included in the design and development of an inspection robot for the oil and gas applications.

Inspection Robots in Oil and Gas Industry: a Review of Current Solutions and Future Trends

“…Visual inspection is simple and it is one of the easiest inspection techniques to perform. However, it is only suitable for detecting damages on the surface and the inspection quality is sensitive to illumination [6].…”

A novel directional lighting algorithm for concrete crack pixel-level segmentation

“…6 Previous studies conducting automated defect detection in low-light environments have only considered diffused lighting sources to illuminate image scenes 7 . 8 Other studies have used image processing techniques to remove non-uniform lighting as a pre-processing method. 9 However, in a manual visual inspection, a human inspector may use non-uniform lighting to their advantage and vary the angle and direction of lighting to enhance any present defects.…”

Design and Development of an External Modular Pi-XTS Robot for Detecting Presence of Defects in Pipelines

“…In-line robot understand the inside condition of the pipeline while in case of above ground pipeline, the external surface of the pipeline is more prone to deterioration where condition outside the pipelines cannot be inspected easily from inside of it. Therefore, there is a need of frequent maintenance in the pipeline outer surfaces [2]. The possible risk of this above ground pipeline can be reduced if the correct replacement of correct position of pipe is carried out and this external surface deterioration spots can be identified with the use of an external inspection robot which will save the manual labour.…”