Design of Out Pipe Crawler for Oil Refinery based on Analysis & Classification of Locomotion and Adhesion Techniques

In the current industrial situation, inspection of pipelines at an inaccessible region in refinery during plant shutdown is performed manually using huge scaffoldings, which involves significant time and money and are a hazardous task for human beings as well. In this paper, we have designed a robot as an automated crawler for movement over pipeline terrain. These designed crawlers certainly have to move in vertical direction carrying some payload to perform their assigned task accurately at a specific height. To accomplish the above-discussed conditions, climbing crawler must possess a certain set of rules related to locomotion and adhesion of the robot for slip-free and smooth motion over a vertical pipeline. Based on literature survey and comparative analysis on shape, size, energy efficiency and mobility of different robots with mechanical examination of different characteristics of design with locomotion technique a compliant, encapsulated caged type wheel-driven robot with gripping adhesion mechanism has been developed and tested in this research, with payload capacity of about 200 gms over a ferromagnetic pipeline of scale used in different oil or gas refineries. The developed and tested encapsulated caged prototype crawler presented in this paper has cost-effectiveness as its major distinctive feature with small in size and simple in structure.