Comprehensive Highly Integrated Maintenance Engineer's Robotic Assistant - Version 2 (CHIMERA 2)

Pressure vessels are safety critical infrastructure, present across many industries such as oil and gas, nuclear, petrochemical and aerospace. Assuring the safety of these ageing assets is increasingly important, as there have been many fatal failures in the past. This is affected via regular assessments of fitness for service, which are regulated by exacting industry standards.

The standards specify that a full volumetric inspection of pressure vessels must be carried out every five years. 20% of pressure vessels in the oil and gas industry cannot be inspected externally and internal inspections require production shutdown. Industry have publicised the need to remove humans from these **dull, dirty, dangerous and demanding** environments. Therefore industry is pushing for non-intrusive robotic inspections

Internal inspection has significant cost and health and safety risk associated with it: in order to carry out such inspection, the operator must stop production, depressurise, store extracted fluid, vent , etc. The total cost associated with these activities can easily exceed £1M within a few days. More importantly, these tasks are currently carried out by human operators. It is not possible for humans to carry out inspection on these assets without breaking containment, the only way to do so, is via robotics and artificial intelligence. Providing such solutions is our main motivation.

CHIMERA is a semi-autonomous robotic crawler for internal pressure vessel inspection, maintenance and repair. It can be deployed into the pressure vessel without breaking containment via an innovative bolt on headworks. The current version is equipped with sensors for self-localisation, brush for cleaning vessel walls (both in air), ultrasonic inspection system (capable of functioning in water), supplied with AI, which creates corrosion maps and reasoned maintenance and repair plans and a slender arm for visual inspection and repair in aeroengines. The project is coming to an end, with testing and demonstrations of the crawler about to start and the slender arm demonstrations delayed by six months due to COVID-19. It is proposed to develop the next better integrated version of CHIMERA - CHIMERA 2, with both navigation and ultrasonic systems capable of functioning in a vessel half-filled with water and the robotic arm suitable for inspection of aircraft wings too.

There are close ties between the consortium and the targeted industries, providing a direct route to market/exploitation. The members propose to exploit them and demonstrate a fully integrated version, CHIMERA 2, to external stakeholders at the end of the new project.