Bathyscaphic Robotic Floor Thickness Monitoring of Hazardous Liquid Storage Tanks (NautilUS)

The NautilUS bathyscaphic robot will reduce the costs, danger and environmental and health and safety risks involved in inspections required by the American Petroleum Institute (API) industry standard for petrochemical storage tank periodic inspections and in particular for corrosion thinning of the tank floor. At the same time, the shortcomings of existing robotic solutions will be overcome due to unique motion characteristics of the robotic NautilUS platform. The output of the project will lead to a product that will increase the turnover and profitability of the 3 UK SMEs - Monition Ltd, InnotecUK Ltd and Diagnostic Sonar Ltd (DSL) through the creation of an opportunity worth £17M in turnover over the five years following commercialisation. The overall objective of negating the current need for removing the tank to be inspected from service will be achieved through developments in low power explosion-proof robot design, the development of in-tank robot localisation and ultrasonics hardware and software developments, which will be integrated into a product to provide a cost-effective, continuously deployed statistical inspection solution.