Inspection of unmanned aerial vehicles in oil and gas industry: critical analysis of platforms, sensors, networking architecture, and path planning

The rapid growth of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has huge potential in the oil and gas industry (OGI). These are especially helpful in situations in which human lives are at risk. OGI pipelines are threatened by natural and man-made disasters, which are harmful to both people and assets. Usually, oil and gas pipelines pass through extreme environments for which standard inspection, maintenance, and repairing approaches such as rope access, scaffolds, telescopic elevation platforms supported by cranes, and manned helicopters are not secure and difficult and expensive to implement. However, technological advancements like device miniaturization have boosted the performance of UAVs, offering cost-effective, efficient, and high mission flexibility. UAVs are capable of carrying sensors and cameras to perform monitoring. As pipelines span thousands of kilometers, multi-UAV systems, commonly referred to as flying ad-hoc networks (FANETs), can collaboratively complete monitoring missions more effectively and economically as compared with single UAV systems. Moreover, many issues must be resolved before the effective use of UAVs can provide stable and reliable context-specific networks. Several OGI-specific issues of UAVs such as architecture design, platform, sensors, networking architectures, and path planning models for different OGI pipeline surveillance scenarios must be resolved to use FANETs effectively for robust and sustainable networks. The prime objective of this research is a state-of-the-art review of UAVs in OGI. We first present OGI midstream challenges and parameters to give a brief overview of the challenges faced by the OGI for pipeline surveillance. Then we discuss OGI-specific scenarios for sensor readings, visual leak detection, and detection of any unusual activity that happens in the pipeline while monitoring through UAVs. We also present different OGI-specific UAV platforms, UAV networking architectures, and path planning models of FANET for efficient communication and collaboration. Finally, the challenges of UAVs and future research prospects in OGI-specific UAVs are highlighted.