Safeguarding Safety Critical Infrastructure with Mobile Robot Inspectors , Opportunities and Challenges

Safeguarding Critical Infrastructure with Robotic Inspection, Opportunities and Challenges Reliable Non Destructive Testing (NDT) is vital to the integrity, performance management and sustainability of capital assets in safety critical industries such as oil and gas, aerospace, transportation, power generation and off-shore and subsea operations. The talk will explore opportunities to improve the NDT of industrial structures and decrease the cost of inspection by automating the NDT with mobile robots. The challenges of developing mobile wall climbing and submersible robots will be presented that can provide access to test sites on very large vertical structures or structures located in hazardous environments thereby eliminating the large expense of erecting scaffolding or lengthy preparation for rope and platform access before inspection can start. Some of these developments provide the possibility of saving costs by reducing outage times or carrying out the NDT in-service thus preventing expensive outages. The presentation will show climbing and swimming robots developed to detect weld and corrosion defects on ship hulls, floating platforms, mooring chains, petrochemical storage tanks, pressure vessels, concrete structures, wind blades and aircraft wings and fuselage.