Keynote: Robotic Non Destructive Testing

This keynote paper aims to highlight the application of mobile robots to perform inspection and non destructive testing (NDT) in industries such as aerospace, large scale fabrication, pipelines, petro-chemical storage and power generation. It describes industrial tasks where regular inspection is essential to ensure the integrity of infrastructure such as storage tanks, pressure vessels, pipelines, aircraft, ships, etc, and to provide managers of capital assets with data to plan outages and to make decisions on the life span of their infrastructure. The development of robot prototypes is described for these industrial tasks. These robots deploy NDT systems by first providing access to large vertical structures or to test sites that are inaccessible to humans. They are designed to reduce outage time, or where possible, carry out the NDT online thus preventing costly outages.