Exploring Robotic Applications in Offshore Oil&Gas Industry

The oil and gas industry will keep booming in the coming few decades. The intensifying need to obtain oil and gas from more challenging conventional and non-conventional resources will impose very considerable demands on the sector's human, financial and technology capabilities. Since the future supplies of conventional and non-conventional oil and gas are to expand, it will become increasingly necessary to obtain access to resources in more technologically advanced areas. Oil and gas technologies will be destined for hostile, hard-to-reach environments, which could be very costly to operate in the coming future. The offshore oil industry is a complicated myriad of equipment, structures, and work force. Our previous work has discussed the challenges of robotics and automation in the offshore oil&gas industry with severe work conditions. This paper reviews the current technology, presents the requirements of robotics and automation in the oil&gas industry and discusses future research opportunities from a technical perspective. Our objectives are to identify potential applications and research directions of robotics and automation in the oil&gas field and explore the obstacles and challenges of robotic application to this area.