SBIR Phase I: Mobile inspection robot for industrial corrosion detection

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The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to improve the accuracy, safety, and efficiency of pipe corrosion inspections for petrochemical and other manufacturing facilities. Pipe corrosion is a major issue, estimated to cost 3.4% of the global gross domestic product (GDP), and if left unmanaged, can result in catastrophic safety and economic incidents such as fatalities or fugitive gas emissions (which can total 13 million metric tons/year in oil and gas alone). Current methods to inspect pipe corrosion are expensive, slow, manual, and unable to collect all the necessary data requested by field engineers. The proposed robotic solution addresses these issues by: (1) improving safety and efficiency through improved inspection and localization mechanisms, (2) reducing the need for expensive and dangerous manual auxiliary inspection tasks such as scaffold construction and insulation removal, and (3) reporting significantly higher amounts of analytical data to allow improved decision making by corrosion engineers.This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will enable the development of a new. highly-automated, robotic pipe inspection tool. Current inspection data is both difficult and manually-intensive to obtain. A novel pipe crawling robot has been created that enables automated inspection scans of pipes for a niche use case. Improvements in both onboard sensors and spatial positioning may enable widespread commercial adoption. The proposed research will improve the onboard sensor capabilities of the robot for improved corrosion detection uses and create an artificial intelligence-driven positioning system to improve locomotion, obstacle avoidance, and data integrity. Objective 1 requires both mechanical and electrical research, ranging from physical design challenges (including adhering to strict clearance, size, and weight requirements) to data processing experiments to regulatory research. Objective 2 encompasses research in autonomous movement, obstacle avoidance, and three-dimensional geometry reconstruction. The resulting robot may provide the industry with a safer and cheaper method of inspecting critical piping infrastructure, thus preventing potentially catastrophic safety and financial consequences and environmentally-detrimental leaks.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.