Robotic Non destructive testing of safety critical structures

Reliable Non Destructive Testing (NDT) is vital to the integrity and performance management of capital assets in safety critical industries such as aerospace, transportation, pipelines, petro-chemical processing, and power generation. The structures that are to be inspected are usually very large and located in remote and hazardous environments. The NDT system has to be deployed by first providing very expensive access, requiring the erection of scaffolding and lengthy preparation before NDT can start. In addition the system is required to find and characterize component and structural defects to a high probability of detection thereby decreasing the probability of failure. Another priority is to reduce outage time as the cost of loss of production runs into millions. This paper describes recent developments in mobile wall climbing, swimming and pipe crawling robots that provide the means to perform NDT on difficult to access structures and in some cases provide the possibility of carrying out the NDT in-service thus preventing costly outages. In confined and hazardous environments they are the only means to reach a test site and perform the NDT.