Hierarchical Controller for Autonomous Tracking of Buried Oil and Gas Pipelines and Geotagging of Buried Pipeline Structure

Abstract

Oil, and gas pipeline network around the globe are highly complex and are exposed to extreme environmental conditions. Routine inspection and maintenance of these pipelines thus have high priority in the oil and gas operations. Pigging is one of the most promising internal pipeline inspection technique employed by the oil and gas industry, but the pre-installation procedures that have to be followed for flawless pig operation makes it time-consuming and expensive. The external pipeline inspection is done manually by a group of operators using various hand-held sensors. The operators have to walk/drive along the pipeline structure to collect visual/sensor data and the accuracy of these results are highly dependent on the experience of the operator. The challenges in the current inspection technique can be tackled with the use of an autonomous robotic inspection system and are presented here. In this paper, a region-specific condition of autonomous buried pipeline tracking methodology is demonstrated.In UAE, the oil and gas pipelines are mostly buried under a raised berm, a trapezoidal structure made up of sand over the pipeline structure. The pipelines are buried in two ways under the berm (i) single pipeline in the middle of the raised berm and (ii) two pipelines buried on the two edges of the raised berm. The Autonomous Robotic Inspection System (ARIS) should track and navigate along these buried pipelines without fail/skid. A novel hierarchical tracking algorithm based on the pipe locator and sonar sensor is developed and demonstrated in this paper. The experimental setup similar to the real buried pipeline condition was created in a lab environment and the tracking algorithm was tested. The results obtained show the ability of the ARIS to track and navigate along with the buried pipeline structure even in extreme conditions. An autonomous geotagging of buried pipeline structure is also presented in this paper.