Subsea pipelines are critical to offshore oil and gas, but inspecting them is costly, risky, and often unreliable. This project developed SmartTouch—an advanced robotic system that uses touch-based sensing and dexterous manipulators to detect damage in underwater pipelines, making inspections safer, faster, and more accurate.
Project Significance & Impact
With thousands of miles of pipelines lying on the ocean floor, early detection of damage is essential to prevent leaks, accidents, and costly failures. Traditional inspections rely on divers or manual ROVs, which are expensive and prone to human error.
SmartTouch changes the game by combining robotic arms with touch-sensitive sensors that can feel for loose bolts, cracks, and deformations. This technology improves safety, reduces inspection costs, and helps prevent disasters. It also opens the door to fully autonomous inspections of other subsea structures, supporting the future of safer, smarter offshore operations.
Project Outcomes
Project Details
One of the fundamental building blocks of the subsea oil and gas industry are the thousands of miles of pipelines installed across the seabed, such as in the Gulf of Mexico. The pipelines serve to carry valuable fluids from subterranean reservoirs to the topside, and thus must be able to withstand years of high pressure, high temperature conditions. While subsea pipelines may be engineered to withstand such harsh conditions, unexpected events can prematurely cause failure of pipeline structures, including bolted flanges, welding, etc.
Such events are ideally mitigated by timely maintenance and inspection of subsea pipeline structures. However, such routine actions can be excessively costly and when divers are involved, the issue of safety becomes a major consideration. Furthermore, depending on the skill and experience of human operators, certain critically damaged components may be missed. Failures that occur from damages that were overlooked by inspection routines can have catastrophic consequences, leading to hundreds of fatalities and billions of dollars of damage over the past two decades.
The events have inspired the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) to issue a recent public report highlighting the need for better detection of damage in subsea infrastructure, especially for bolted structures. Thus, the goal of this project was to develop transformative robotic and SmartTouch sensing technology, that will lead to a time-efficient and cost-effective system for underwater pipeline inspection.
