Over the past few years, many communications were made by robot manufacturers showing inspection robot prototypes on production sites. As the first autonomous and explosion proof inspection robots become commercial, and even if oil & gas operators are more and more interested, many have difficulty seeing how value can be generated with this new tool. This paper will describe TotalEnergies' journey towards robot implementation on site. TotalEnergies' use of robotics on site comes from a vision of a new operating philosophy where sites will be unattended for very long periods. Based on the activities that need to be done between human interventions, TotalEnergies engaged in the development of different types of robots. Even though robots are new tools, they must comply with existing operating procedures as much as possible to be adopted by field operations teams. Among the points that require special attention for efficient operations, are robot capabilities, mission planning, data post-processing and full integration of the robots into the company's IT systems. The best way to get robots fit for purpose for an oil & gas operator is to be able to weigh in on the robots' specifications by providing the manufacturer challenging use cases. Doing so, features like explosion proof design, autonomy, long arm and more become obvious. Expectations from field operators are quite high when a robot is on site. They imagine that the robot will "start doing things", not realizing that the robot is an empty shell even if it is autonomous. To prepare operations with robots, a digital model of the installation must be available, and a maintenance/operation engineering exercise must be done to highlight the step-by-step instructions that will be given to the robots. The difficulty with the data collected by the robot is that it can rarely be used directly as we do for numerical values coming from transmitters. In most cases, the interesting information like a value, a status open/close or on/off, needs to be extracted from an image, a video or another support by artificial intelligence. Finally, the robot cannot be an independent piece of equipment on site and must be treated like any other package by the site control system. Starting with TotalEnergies' roadmap on robotics, the paper will give feedback on various field trials from different sites, combining altogether nearly one thousand missions. Then, a focus will be made on how to prepare and integrate robotics operations on site to be able to scale up and open this new frontier for improved safety, reduced environmental footprint and costs and increased production efficiency.

One of the missions of the TotalEnergies’ R&D is to pave the way for tomorrow's simpler, streamlined and less expensive facilities. The vision is focused on unmanned installations in which autonomous ground robots are key components. In 2017, the ARGOS (Autonomous Robots for Gas and Oil Sites) Challenge delivered the first prototype of a new generation of autonomous, ATEX-compliant ground robots capable of detecting anomalies. Based on this success, TotalEnergies started a few projects with the aim to introduce and standardize robotics on O&G sites. The first project is the development of a series of autonomous robots, designed to withstand the rough O&G environment for long durations: an inspection robot and an operator robot. The second project is the adaptation of the standard methods of engineering operations for green-field developments as well as preparing the implementation of robots on brownfields. The third one is the development of a specific environment to remotely supervise a fleet of robots operating simultaneously on a same site. A major take away for the success of robotics implementation is increasing the technological readiness as well as usability and acceptance of the whole robotics operation system. This can be verified only through exposure to users in a realistic environment. After each major development, their proper achievement is measured following a robust process of observation in different contexts. An incremental approach for trials was implemented from testing in specific laboratory conditions up to long duration pilots on major installations under the custody of the future users. Those complex tests are a tremendous source of deep insight in understanding robotic operations and allowing the research to be pushed further towards a more practical solution for the petroleum industry. The presentation will highlight the first tangible results from the operational implementation and prototypes testing of robots and the readiness of robotics for Oil and Gas. The experience gained by TotalEnergies in developing Robotics Operations through testing it extensively in various industrial contexts, represents a unique case with this large scale of usages. It was already shared with some of our peers and this paper is a great opportunity to expose to the Oil and Gas industry to our vision of how to prepare the future of unmanned, safe and environmentally friendly operations.

TotalEnergies’ use of robotics on remote or offshore sites is considered with the objective of enabling unmanned operation for long periods and as the next frontier for increased personnel safety, industry attractiveness for young talents and further OPEX and CAPEX reduction. TotalEnergies performed several IT/OT system architecture evolutions and developed a specific Robot Supervision System (RSS) equivalent to a fleet management system to help and consolidate know-how in the deployments of specific mobile ground robots. As the first autonomous and explosion-proof inspection ground robots become commercial, many have difficulties seeing how these new devices can be interfaced with legacy industrial systems and how its data can be represented in a user-friendly interface to make the remote operation of robot efficient & attractive enough. Only this level of interfacing will enable the possibility for automated inspection, operation, and maintenance tasks execution with intuitive programmable interfaces. The robotic devices also need also to comply with detailed specifications in order to communicate its data in real time to the supervision system. We will describe the specific modifications required to the robot associated systems to be used within a private industrial network and the specification for real time interfacing of its data. Many Robot suppliers initiated their system developments focusing on robot navigation but a lot of the interfacing complexity with operator companies remained to be achieved to exchange data with the site digital twin, the maintenance task planning tool, the cloud machine learning software resources, or the Process Data Management System (PDMS) or even the plant control system (DCS). The associated functionalities of the RSS will also be presented: Acquisition, historization and user-friendly display of robot's dataIntegrate several robot types or from several vendorsInterface with all company systemsVisual 3D digital twin environment to display data acquired by the robot or useful data for its remote operationIntuitive configuration and management of robot for routine tasks or based on a specific plant event or alarmComply with specific industrial cybersecurity rules Feedback will also be given on how it has been possible to adapt the IT architectures and how we intend to fit the requirements of OT systems to adopt robots with more critical interactions with the industrial process. We can present our approach for upscaling robot deployment with this on-premises supervision systems capable of historizing the data, generating immersive front-end displays for robots’ operators and managing secured interconnections to corporate systems. Figure 1An experienced operator using the RSS - View of the 2 main dashboard types (summary mashups & 3D view)