robotics

Saipem is taking the lead in advancing the capabilities of FlatFish, an autonomous underwater vehicle being developed by Shell for commercial application by 2020.

Technologies are being developed that have the potential to support marine mining in all stages from prospection to decommissioning. These developments will likely have substantial influence in the oil and gas industry, itself searching for ways to maximize exploitation of assets.

An 18-month project will develop and trial a mobile robot for autonomous operational inspection of Total facilities.

The CEO of Houston Mechatronics told an Aramco Innovation Day audience that robotics is at the same point that the Internet and online communication were at in the mid-1990s and will soon become “the iconic technology of this century.”

Robots have the potential to move human operators away from uncomfortable, potentially risky environments and into comfortable, safe control rooms.

Saudi Aramco is on a mission to increase the amount of seismic data that it collects by fourfold, while reducing costs and acquisition time by half of what it spends today.

Robotic submarines, capable of operating by themselves thousands of feet underwater for months or perhaps years at a time, are under development as the vanguard of tomorrow’s subsea oil and gas fields.