Non Destructive Testing With Mobile Wall Climbing And Swimming Robots (Abstract)

This keynote paper will describe the application of mobile climbing and swimming robots to perform Non Destructive Testing (NDT) of large safety critical infrastructure. Tools are required for the integrity management of structures such as storage tanks, pressure vessels, aircraft, ships, mooring chains, wind and tidal turbine towers/blades, subsea oil and gas pipelines and flexible risers, etc.[1, 2, 3]. The mobile robots are designed to provide access and deploy a variety of NDT techniques to test sites located on these structures. They obviate the need to carry out lengthy and expensive preparation such as the erection of scaffolding or the dangerous deployment of rope abseiling and platform systems. The aim is to reduce planned outage times by speeding up inspection and wherever possible to perform the NDT on-line thus preventing costly outages. In addition, intrusive robotic inspection systems are usually the only means to perform NDT of structures located in hazardous or difficult to access environments