Design and Control of Vertical Pipeline Climbing Robot with Quadcopter Locomotion System

Crude oil pipelines face a constant risk of failure due to factors such as cracking or corrosion. Such failures can pose dangers to personnel, cause environmental harm, and result in significant economic burdens. Opting for robots that conduct external pipeline inspections is advantageous, as they can perform inspections without causing disruptions to production processes. Additionally, these robots can be deployed at any location along the pipeline as needed. However, external inspection robots for vertical pipelines have many limitations. In this paper, the design, simulation, and control of a novel climbing robot that incorporates a quadcopter means of locomotion is presented. The purpose of this robot is to carry external defect sensors to monitor the health of the horizontal and vertical pipelines. The developed robot is modular in design, able to ascend vertical pipes, demonstrate flexibility around pipe bends, adjust to varying pipe diameters, and utilize a resilient quadcopter propulsion system. A virtual robotics platform based on the Gazebo simulator has been built to simulate the robot and the pipeline in a realistic environment. A sliding mode controller (SMC) has been developed and implemented to control the attitude of the quadcopter’s propulsion system, and the Proportional Integral Derivative (PID) controller has been designed for thrust force control. The simulation results demonstrate the capability of the proposed out-pipe climbing robot to climb the pipeline while offering smooth movement when the bending angle of the pipe is set to 90 degrees.