Aker BP deploys robotic dog on North Sea FPSO

Norwegian oil and gas company Aker BP and Cognite, an industrial AI software-as-a-service (SaaS) company, have partnered to deploy Spot, the quadruped robotic dog, to pioneer the remote-controlled offshore mission on the Skarv FPSO installation in the North Sea.

The effort continues to build upon Aker BP and Cognite’s digital agenda to transform the industry through digitalization.

The goal is to achieve improved efficiency, safety, and sustainability offshore, Aker BP explained in a statement on Tuesday.

Spot’s work offshore is the next step in his journey as he was issued his official employee number in February at the Aker BP Capital Markets Day.

In addition, Aker BP has a number of other projects involving drones and additional mobile robots to deliver on their vision of optimized remote operations using Cognite’s data-driven technology.

Cognite’s main software product, Cognite Data Fusion (CDF), served as the data infrastructure for the offshore test which collected images, scans, sensors from robotics systems and then shared the data across Aker BP via a dashboard to make it actionable.

Tasks included: autonomous inspection, high-quality data capture, and automatic report generation. These data insights provide onshore operators with telepresence on offshore installations allowing them complete real-time mission planning and help drive crucial activities.

The mobility of Spot offshore, and the communication between Spot, Cognite Data Fusion and Aker BP was both verified and tested.

Data from Spot was available and sorted in Cognite Data Fusion in milliseconds, and Spot was remote-controlled from a Cognite home office onshore demonstrating how robots and digital twins can have synergies and enhance each other.

In addition, data from an operator round was collected to analyze if the sensor-stack on Spot was sufficient to comply with the proposed task.

Karl Johnny Hersvik, CEO of Aker BP, said: “The Spot’s offshore visit at Skarv FPSO is one small step towards Aker BP’s vision to digitalize all our operations from cradle to grave in order to increase productivity, enhance quality and improve the safety of our employees”.

“We can use missions like these to advance Spot’s capabilities and Cognite continues to lead the way in testing and validating Spot’s ability to reduce risk to humans and provide value in the energy industry”, said Michael Perry, Vice President of Business Development at Boston Dynamics.

Dr. John Markus Lervik, CEO of Cognite, said: “This historic pairing of minds and machines working together to solve industry problems demonstrates that data-driven decisions can change industry now”.