Drill Ship Red Zone Exposure Reduced Through Use of Industrial Robotics

Abstract The improvement of offshore drilling safety can be significantly impacted by reducing red zone exposure. By limiting the amount of time personnel spend in hazardous areas of the rig, the risk of injury is substantially decreased. However, decreasing red zone exposure often presents technical challenges, as many tasks in these areas have historically been completed by hand. These tasks typically involve complicated, multi-step processes that lack commercially available automated equipment. Therefore, custom automated robotic solutions that are both versatile and adaptive are required. Riser operations are one such complex red zone activity. To automate this process, several deepwater drilling rigs have implemented an industrial robotic solution for riser run and pull operations. This paper will compare the total number of man-hours spent in the red zone during traditional manual riser operations versus those using automated robotic systems by using data collected from a red zone monitoring systems.