A cost-oriented robot for the Oil Industry

Abstract

Robotics has the potential to contribute significant benefits for offshore and onshore petroleum industry for the next decades, but in fact has nowadays often the problem of missing wide commercial availability, which means that robotics is in some cases more expensive for the industry that it should be, or the development period is complex. In the end, there is a big potential for the petroleum industry to increase profits, safety or production capacity when implementing more robotic technique in their production process. Nevertheless, this potential is barely used due to given economic, organizational and social barriers. This paper gives first an overview on robots in the petroleum industry, focuses on improvements especially in the case of robotic vehicles which move inside a pipeline for inspection reasons, so called in-pipe inspection robots.. Existing locomotion methods as well as in development or described in the literature were shortly described and discussed. One of the main problems is the cost of these robots and cost efficiency and orientation is evaluated with a simple 5-points evaluation method.