A review of robotics in onshore oil-gas industry

Abstract

With shrinking resources and increasing demand for petroleum products, oil and gas industries are forced to rethink over their present pace for automatization of industry. New oil fields, mostly located in extreme conditions, are posing serious challenges to both human and environment in terms of safety. Tasks which are repeated, dirty, and dangerous and require high degree of accuracy are already automatized in manufacturing industry. This success has inspired oil and gas industry to lend some of its highly dangerous and repetitive tasks for automation. Most of the processes are remotely operated, and require highly skilled operator. Such processes benefits not only in terms of overall health and safety, by removing humans from hazardous environment, but also by reduction of number staff members required for continuous inspection and manipulation of plant facilities. Considering the sensitivity of inflammable products involved in this industry usage of completely autonomous robots is still a far fetch choice. Therefore, semi-autonomous robots are excellent choice for this industry at-least as near future solution. In oil and gas industry, robots are used both in upstream and downstream process such as pipe handling in drilling operations, pipe inspection, tank inspection, and remote controlled underwater vehicles (ROVs). This paper presents the state of art technology particularly related to application of robotic solutions to in-pipe inspection robots (IPIRs) and tank inspection robots (TIRs) at onshore oil and gas facilities.