Gas Pipeline Inspection Using Autonomous Robots With Omni-Directional Cameras

Maintenance of pipelines is a major concern for oil and gas companies and millions of dollars are spent on preventive inspections every year. The type of equipment used in carrying out inspections is expensive and very sophisticated requiring very specialized manpower. Here, a novel approach to pipe...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE sensors journal 2021-07, Vol.21 (14), p.15544-15553
Main Authors: Karkoub, Mansour, Bouhali, Othmane, Sheharyar, Ali
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Cameras
CCD cameras
distortion
Gas pipelines
image processing
Inspection
Magnetic flux
Manpower
Mirrors
Natural gas
omni-directional camera
Petroleum pipelines
Pipeline inspection
Pipelines
Robot vision systems
robotics
Robots
Shape
Shape optimization
Simulated annealing
Video
Vision systems
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Maintenance of pipelines is a major concern for oil and gas companies and millions of dollars are spent on preventive inspections every year. The type of equipment used in carrying out inspections is expensive and very sophisticated requiring very specialized manpower. Here, a novel approach to pipeline inspection is presented using a small mobile robot and a catadioptric omni-directional vision system. The system captures panoramic videos using conical and/or hyperbolic mirrors, which are transmitted to a monitoring station to examine the inner surface of gas pipelines. The videos are prepped, unwrapped, and un-warped to obtain a realistic flat image of the whole inner surface of the pipeline. The Simulated Annealing optimization method is implemented to optimize the system parameters using different mirror shapes and unwrapping and un-warping techniques. Simulations and experimental studies using a mobile robot equipped with a CCD camera and a conical mirror are presented here to demonstrate the viability of this inspection technique. The developed robotic system can be used to visually pre-scan pipelines before using much more expensive tools such as magnetic flux leakage (MFL) or ultrasound (UT) based inspection systems. These latter tools cost tens of thousands of dollars per hour and will be used only after suspicious areas are visually detected. This will reduce the inspection time and cost significantly.
ISSN:1530-437X
1558-1748
DOI:10.1109/JSEN.2020.3043277