Telerobot: Failure Detection Using Imaging Technique for Piping Internal Surfaces

Pipelines are the energy lifelines of almost every activity of everyday life. It is a safe way of transporting water, gas and oil over long distances. It is also the most practical way to deliver oil and gas across countries as being an extremely safe and economically viable solution to transport energy. Cracking and corrosion on the external and/or internal surfaces of in-service pipes, reduces the integrity of the material and potentially reduces the service life of the transportation system and equipment. Defects in pipelines may have various forms and may be initiated by one or more mechanisms potentially resulting in corrosion and/or cracking. In this paper we propose a system that detects the internal cracks in pipelines through a telerobot which can be inserted into the pipelines and detects the internal Failures (cracks) through a special modern high resolution digital camera and image processing techniques. The telerobot is a programmable and can be controlled as per the requirements such as speed and direction of the telerobot and sensors using mobile application and can be connected to a computer and smart phone. The telerobot captures a high definition images and also captures the precise location. These images are transferred to a computing facility for the analyses and to detect cracks.