Development of a 3D environment perception system for unmanned emergency repair robots for oil and gas pipelines

In view of the great danger of manual emergency repair of oil and gas pipeline, we utilized an unmanned equipment (namely a robot) to replace manual operation. While the robot doing the pipeline repair work at the accident site, the staff operates the robot remotely outside the dangerous zone. In the work described in this paper, a 3D environment perception system is developed, a 2D LiDAR is assembled on a rotating unit driven by a stepper motor. While the 2D LiDAR is rotated, it collects data continuously. The 3D point clouds are calculated by combining the return data of the 2D LiDAR and the rotation angle of the rotating unit. This costumed 3D laser scanner is mounted on the robot to sense the 3D outline of the environment of the accident site. Two sets of upper computer software are developed to transmit the 3D point cloud data from the robot to the control terminal which is in the safe zone, and analyze the 3D point cloud to obtain useful information, such as the diameter, position, and posture of the pipeline, which is helpful for the remote control of the robot. The experimental results verified the accuracy of the 3D environment perception system.