Compensation method for pipeline centerline measurement of in-line inspection during odometer slips based on multi-sensor fusion and LSTM network

The accurate measurement of pipeline centerline coordinates is of great significance to the management of oil and gas pipelines and energy transportation security. The main method for pipeline centerline measurement is in-line inspection technology based on multi-sensor data fusion, which combines the inertial measurement unit (IMU), above-ground marker, and odometer. However, the observation of velocity is not accurate because the odometer often slips in the actual inspection, which greatly affects the accuracy of centerline measurement. In this paper, we propose a new compensation method for oil and gas pipeline centerline measurement based on a long short-term memory (LSTM) network during the occurrence of odometer slip. The field test results indicated that the mean of absolute position errors reduced from 8.75 to 2.02 m. The proposed method could effectively reduce the errors and improve the accuracy of pipeline centerline measurement during odometer slips.