Drones and robotics: Rewriting the rules of industrial inspection

Inspection is the backbone of safe, reliable operations in the energy and industry sectors.

For decades, inspecting an elevated asset, a confined space or a live flare tip meant one of a few uncomfortable options: build a scaffold, deploy personnel on ropes, use of a man basket or defer and hope for the best.

The real cost of traditional inspection goes beyond the activity investment. There’s a human element, and sending personnel into hazardous environments carries real and unnecessary risk. In tandem with a shrinking talent pipeline (experienced technicians retiring faster than they’re replaced), inspections are more frequently deferred because access is too difficult or expensive The result? Defects that could have been caught early become emergencies, and unplanned downtime always cost more than the inspection that could have prevented it.

The new landscape

Imagine this: a drone equipped with a high-resolution zoom and infrared camera inspecting a live flare tip while it’s actively burning. Robotic crawlers travel up vertical structures and along vessel walls to collect data from places physically impossible or prohibitively risky for a human to access. Borescopes snaking through small openings to inspect pipe interiors. Submersible systems assessing below-waterline assets.

The data these platforms generate has matured just as fast as the platforms themselves. Specialized drones now carry an array of testing sensors and can make direct contact with assets at height, shifting the conversation from "I can see something is wrong" to "I can see, measure, quantify and digitally report on the item under investigation."

LiDAR and photogrammetry mapping build three-dimensional point clouds as the drone or land-based platform navigates, creating precise digital models that support engineering analysis and give future inspections a documented baseline to compare against.

What results is time-stamped, georeferenced, high-resolution data that can be reviewed repeatedly, shared across disciplines and interrogated by inspection, engineering, maintenance and reliability teams from a single dataset. This kind of cross-functional visibility (everyone working from a single source of truth) has rarely been possible, much less leveraged to its full extent.

What makes all the difference

In this field, experience matters even more than equipment. TEAM has been building its drone and robotic inspection programs since the 1980s. Now, it is ushering in a new era of technology-driven asset integrity transparency.

Through internal and external unmanned aircraft system, crawler-mounted multipurpose payloads, advanced borescope systems, foreign object search and retrieval and remote virtual inspection programs, TEAM is paving the way for faster, safer and more precise inspection.

But the real value is more than transparency. It’s the immediate, confident action this level of data quality unlocks. TEAM360, TEAM’s broader asset integrity framework, ensures discovery is followed by diagnosis, repair and long-term integrity management, all by the same team. Because inspection isn’t the end of the process. It’s where everything else begins.

For more information, teaminc.com.