Inside Pipe Inspection: A Review Considering the Locomotion Systems

It is possible to observe that the fast technological development in the fields of instrumentation, control and embedded systems are increasing the employment of robotic systems for the execution of a large variety of tasks, for example, oil exploration or load transportation. In this way, there are many situations where it is very reasonable to use automatized systems, with special attention to the inspection of pipelines in the oil industry. There is a large quantity of systems developed and in the literature it is possible to find several reviews about inspection robots considering specifics applications. However, none of those reviews presents the methodology to acquire defect’s position. The main objective of this paper is to review the technical literature, describing the differences between robots employed to internal pipe inspection considering some features as application, adaptability, locomotion, sensors inspection and odometers.