Development of a Pipeline Inspection Robot for the Standard Oil Pipeline of China National Petroleum Corporation

The periodic inspection for oil pipelines is required due to the deterioration over time. A multitude of factors brings such a deterioration, from corrosion, leaks, to cracks, which may lead to blowbacks and cause the damages for operators and the environments. With the progress of robotics technology, various types of mobile robots and mechanisms are designed to cope with this issue. Rather than the assignment of human workers in hazardous environments, the deployment of such kinds of inspection robots can take on this duty more time-efficiently and safely, preventing the human workers from the high-risk of the inspection task in the oil pipelines. This paper presents a novel design of a mobile robot for oil pipeline inspection, which is cooperated with the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC). With the improvement of the previous inspection robot used in CNPC’s standard oil pipelines, the newly designed robot is composed of six groups of symmetrical supporting wheels, and a more powerful motors as well as a more advanced control system. This new design endows the oil pipeline inspection robot with better performance on six aspects: traction, obstacle-adaptivity, operation endurance, gradeability, visual perception, and stability. The field testing results at multiple oil transfer stations across several months demonstrate the reliability of this mobile robot under various severe situations in China and validate its performance in the studied aspects.