Miniature Robotic Drilling Rig for Research and Education in Drilling Automation

Abstract

To accelerate the uptake of drilling automation in Oil and Gas industry, the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) has organized an international student competition called Drillbotics. The main objective of the competition is to design a fully automated miniature drilling rig that could autonomously drill a vertical hole in an unknown formation of rocks of various properties as quickly as possible while maintaining equipment integrity as well as borehole quality. This paper describes the robotic drilling system developed by an NTNU team of drilling engineering students in 2017. The focus of the paper is on the automatic control system and the value of the obtained results for full-scale drilling and for education within drilling automation.