At the beginning of November, the Oil and Gas Technology Centre (OGTC) in Aberdeen ran it’s inaugural Robotics Week, an effort to explore the opportunities to increase the use of robotics offshore.  Lee Wilson of Subsea 7 i-Tech, and the IET’s Robotics and Mechatronics Executive committee went along to participate in the discussion. 


The OGTC, established as as part of the area’s Region Deal, aims to promote innovation and collaboration between industry, academia and funding bodies to help maximise the economic recovery from the UK sector of the North Sea. To this end, a wide range of experts from various sectors and backgrounds was assembled to explore various use cases for robotics, specifically around in the management of asset integrity.


Robotics organisations participating included Diakont, Edinburgh Centre for Robotics, Inuktun, James Fisher Nuclear, QinetiQ Shadow Robot Company, SPRINT Robotics, Subsea 7, Texo Drone and University of Leeds.


The event coincided with the award of EPSRC’s Research Hubs, one of the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund (ISCF) initiatives designed to stimulate the development and deployment of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (RAI) systems in extreme environments. Almost £45m will be used to create four research hubs based at the University of Manchester, University of Birmingham, University of Surrey and Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, with application areas including Nuclear, Space and Offshore Energy.


The hubs are supported by a number of industrial and academic partners. OGTC will be a partner of the Offshore Energy hub (named ORCA for Offshore Robotic Certification of Assets) located at Heriot-Watt University. 


As well as keynote speeches and robotics showcases, two days were dedicated to workshop sessions to explore and develop uses cases and gap analyses in the Land, Sea and Air domains. The use of underwater tele-operated vehicles is well established in subsea oil and gas operations, the UK and Norway having pioneered the use of these ROV systems in the 1980s. However, the use of drones or ground robots on surface platforms remains largely unexploited. 


The workshop sessions were very lively, with a range of thought-provoking discussion and debate. The outcomes from those sessions will inform future “Calls for Ideas” from OGTC and also future research projects for the ORCA hub. The following, taken from the OGTC website, describes some of the challenges outlined by the expert panels:


Air: Fully autonomous drones that can plan and navigate their own flight path.


Land: Small, highly agile robots that can autonomously, climb, navigate and perform inspections, with little or no human intervention and support.


Sea: A pipeline intervention gadget (PIG) that is autonomous, adaptable, reliable, multi-functional and capable of working in harsh environments.


Speakers through the week included Professor David Lane from Heriot Watt University and director of the ORCA Hub, and Jeremy Hadall, Chief Technologist for Robotics & Automation at the Manufacturing Technology Centre.


The IET’s Robotics and Mechatronics TPN is planning an event in 2018 to generate further awareness and discussion in the area of harsh environment robotics, which promises to be a very exciting engineering sector to get involved with in the coming years.

OGTC Robotics Week Intro video

Highlights OGTC Robotics Week


Blogpost written by Lee Wilson,

Exec Member of the Robotics and Mechatronics TPN