Generating Value from Inspection Ground Robots on Operational Sites

Abstract

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.