Ground Robotics: A Comprehensive Journey Towards Remote Operations

Abstract

Abstract Normally Unattended Facilities have a significant cost reduction potential. They represent substantial technical challenges both for their design and for their operability. In our vision, operability is based on a new concept of operations with the presence of resident robots on site. However, this technology is emerging for Oil & Gas applications. This paper presents a methodology applied at TotalEnergies to qualify these solutions and accelerate their deployment on site. Preparing to deploy a completely new technology in a context of a traditional industry and where all the technological bricks are not yet mature or even not yet well identified is far from obvious. Moreover, waiting for everything to be ready and tested before considering using the technology could take a while and delay the anticipated benefits. In order to be ready to deploy this new operating mode as soon as possible, TotalEnergies has embarked on a progressive qualification program with a succession of on-site pilots of increasing complexity and more and more integrated into the field operations organization. This progressive approach with the definition of predefined areas of progress has allowed a sequence of successive pilots taking into account, little by little, all the components of the robotic ecosystem that goes well beyond the simple robot. The paper will present through the history of our previous pilots in North Sea, Europe and Middle East, the preparation of our last pilot on an FPSO in Africa with all the technological bricks developed for a complete integration and adoption of this new operating philosophy in our operations in order to ensure scalability to any type of site. Among these bricks, the emphasis will be placed on the field operation operator experience from the definition of missions with the customization of the existing maintenance engineering tools, to the management of a fleet of autonomous robots, the analysis of data and the necessary evolution of the field operations methods. The paper proposes an evaluation scale to progress in the adoption of an on-site robotic solution and presents the main characteristics and first feedbacks of the latest and most complex robotic pilot of TotalEnergies.