Mobile wall climbing and swimming robots to inspect aircraft, storage tanks, pressure vessels and large infrastructure

Non-destructive testing (NDT) of very large critical infrastructure that may be located in hazardous environments, poses the problem of first gaining access to the test site before the testing can be performed. Providing access usually constitutes the major part of the cost and time spent on the testing. Hence, a great deal of effort has been directed recently at developing mobile robotics that transports a payload of NDT sensors to the test site, preferably without taking the structure out of service. The paper describes a number of mobile, wall climbing, swimming and pipe climbing robots that have been designed by the authors to perform the non-destructive internal inspection of petrochemical storage tanks and nuclear pressure vessels, the inspection of the wings/fuselage of aircraft and the blades on wind turbines by climbing on their external surfaces.