ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION – PIPELINE INSPECTIONS
Manually-operated inspection vehicles are used to
inspect pipelines and pipework. But the days of these
vehicles may be numbered, as researchers look at
truly autonomous inspection and repairs
Inside job
Pipeline inspection robots have
developed from the ‘pigs’
(pipeline inspection gauges) long
used to clean pipework. These
still have their place, but for many
applications, wheeled or tracked ‘crawlers’
are now used.
Jay Neermul is account manager at
Ashtead Technology, a provider of remotelyoperated
inspection robots for pipelines
(examples pictured below and next page).
The company has two main rental markets
– drainage and wastewater, and the oil and
gas industries – with its crawlers typically
operating at a range of up to 300m (limited
by the control umbilical) and covering pipe
diameters from 150-600mm (some larger
models suit pipes up to 1m diameter).
“The crawlers have wheels of various sizes
according to the size of the
pipe – equipment has
to be of a
certain weight and grip, or it will su er from
wheelspin,” says Neermul. These crawlers
are not designed for repair work, but
instead “they will locate where the repair
needs to be made. A sonde an acoustic
transmitter then sends a signal up to the
surface”. “Oil and gas customers look at
ATEX systems,” says Neermul. These are
explosion-proof products that comply with
the ATEX Directive (EU directive 94/9/EC).
Wastewater pipes and sewers may also
come under the Dangerous Substances and
Explosive Atmospheres Regulations.
But the days of manually-operated
inspection vehicles may be numbered.
Researchers are looking at truly
autonomous inspection and even repairs.
AVOIDING DISRUPTION
Professor Kirill Horoshenkov of the
University of She eld is leading a
collaborative team, working with the
Universities of Bristol, Birmingham and
Leeds, to develop intelligent ways to nd
damaged underground water and sewage
pipes, so they can be repaired without
disruptive excavation.
The key is proactive and preventative
maintenance: “At an early stage, the
intervention cost is at a minimum. Most of
the problems are small cracks (which will
become bigger) or blockages or poor joins.
If you detect them earlier, you can send in
cleaning robots or 3D printing robots.”
The project has been funded by £7m
from the Engineering and Physical Sciences
Research Council (EPSRC). “We want to
develop something that is fully autonomous.
Solutions that people call robots are not
really robots, they are like pigs controlled
by an operator above ground. What we are
proposing is radically di erent: for a start,
the robots are going to be very small, much
smaller than the diameter of a pipe.
“Secondly, they will be fully autonomous;
they will make decisions themselves about
where they have to go, and how they
are going to behave.” This is critical: the
PETROBOT project in 2016 concluded
that, “one important di erence between
traditional inspections and robotic
inspections is that the navigation of the
robot needs to be carefully planned prior
to the inspection, as a human is better at
improvising than robots”.
By Toby Clark
An iPEK ROVION RX130
crawler fi tted with panand
tilt camera
10 www.operationsengineer.org.uk June 2019
/www.operationsengineer.org.uk