CEAS EuroGNC 2026
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Autonomous Aerial System for Deployment and Retrieval of Robotic Crawlers for Industrial Inspection
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| Jaime Ortuño-Conde |
Senior Robotics Engineer, CATEC, Seville, Spain. | | Miguel A. Trujillo-Soto |
Head of Autonomous Systems Unit, CATEC, Seville, Spain. | | Antidio Viguria |
CTO of Avionics and Systems, CATEC, Seville, Spain. |
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| Abstract:
Building upon the initial concepts for aerial robotic inspection introduced at ICUAS 2024, this paper presents the maturation and field validation of a fully integrated system for inspecting Corrosion Under Insulation (CUI) in petrochemical facilities. Developed within the EU-funded SIMAR project, the system features a fully actuated aerial platform with tilted rotors, specifically engineered for operation in complex, GNSS-denied environments. It is designed to flexibly integrate various inspection payloads and to perform safe take-off and landing maneuvers on intricate structures such as pipelines and robotic crawlers. The platform is further designed to maintain stable flight under wind gusts of up to 10 m/s and to remain operationally robust in the event of a single rotor failure.
The proposed work describes the complete autonomous workflow for the deployment and retrieval of a remote-operated inspection crawler equipped with industrial-grade sensors, including X-Ray (XR) and Pulsed Eddy Current (PEC), on active industrial pipelines. Key enabling technologies include a multi-sensor fusion algorithm for pipe detection and a vision-based strategy for precise crawler recovery.
The paper culminates with the results of a Technology Readiness Level 7 (TRL7) pilot demonstration carried out at an operational petrochemical facility operated by CHEVRON. During this validation, the SIMAR system demonstrated a 44-fold improvement in inspection efficiency compared to traditional manual methods, while completely eliminating human exposure to work at height.
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| Keywords: UAS; drones; control; tilted; fully-actuated |
 View PDF CEAS-GNC-2026-006 doi: 10.82124/CEAS-GNC-2026-006 |
| Jaime Ortuño-Conde, Miguel A. Trujillo-Soto, Antidio Viguria: Autonomous Aerial System for Deployment and Retrieval of Robotic Crawlers for Industrial Inspection. Proceedings of the 2026 CEAS EuroGNC conference. Madrid, Spain. May 2026. doi: 10.82124/CEAS-GNC-2026-006.
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| BibTeX entry (UTF-8):
@Incollection{CEAS-GNC-2026-006,
author = {Ortuño-Conde, Jaime and Trujillo-Soto, Miguel A. and Viguria, Antidio},
title = {Autonomous Aerial System for Deployment and Retrieval of Robotic Crawlers for Industrial Inspection},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2026 {CEAS EuroGNC} conference},
address = {Madrid, Spain},
month = may,
year = {2026},
doi = {10.82124/CEAS-GNC-2026-006}
}
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