Application of Robotic Technology for Floor Thickness Monitoring of Hazardous Liquid Storage Tanks

Above-ground storage tanks (ASTs) corrode over time, leading to possible leakage of contents, resulting in severe economic losses and pollution. To avoid these consequences, inspection and repair activities are performed periodically according to international regulations. Manual inspections require the tank to be offline for weeks. This robotic project will develop a small intrinsically safe robot to perform in-service inspection. The bathyscaphic robot will use active buoyancy control to move around a tank and use an ultrasound probe to make measurements of (internal) floor thinning each time the robot lands and record data regarding location for post-processing after the robot is retrieved. The project scope aligns with the call ‘Robotic and autonomous systems for the inspection in extreme and challenging environments’, as the innovation will provide an enabling capability in the robotic inspection of ASTs containing, for example, but not limited to, petrochemicals.