Amphibious inspection robot

The paper presents the test results of a swimming and floor moving robot inspection system to test welds located inside a floating production storage and offloading oil tank (FPSO tank). Currently these welds are inspected manually by first emptying and cleaning the tank. This is a time consuming and expensive operation that requires operators to enter a hazardous environment. Significant cost reductions could be made by automating the inspection with robots that provide access to the welds. The simplest way to do this is to empty the tank so that only two to three centimeters of oil remain on thetank. A floor moving robot would then operate autonomously in the tank to follow and inspect the welds. A better solution is to perform the inspection in a full tank. In the first case the robot would operate in air and an explosive environment but would eliminate the need to swim the robot through a very complicated maze of partitioning walls and rows of strengthening plates that occur every 700-900 mm. In the latter case the robot would swim to a strengthening plate and operate under oil thereby eliminating the need to empty the tank. An amphibious mobile robot called FPSO is described which is capable of performing NDT in air and when submerged in liquids.