Chevron Uses Spot Robots for Inspections and More

From Youtube

Chevron has been using Boston Dynamics’ 4-legged Spot robot in its oil and gas operations for several years now. And the company continues to scale the number of robots and the tasks they complete. According to Boston Dynamics, Chevron now has more Spot robots than any other O&G company. 

“What I've been doing the last few years is working on operational robotics and trying to put technologies in people's hands out in the field that would make their job easier and give them better data, and also help take them out of harm's way,” said Marilee Phan, Robotics Engineer at Chevron, in a recent video.

The Spot robots at Chevron are equipped with many different sensors to help in operations, safety, inspections, and more. “It has a thermal camera, a high definition pan tilt zoom (PTZ), an acoustic leak detector, and then a gas detector for safety and a LIDAR to help it navigate,” said Zach Pringnitz, Robotics Engineer at Chevron. 

By taking quantitative measurements consistently over time, the Spot robots are helping Chevron make better decisions. “It really helps us be more predictive, have better decision making, reliability, and help drive our decisions here so we know that we're doing the right thing at the right time,” said Josh Hofstatter, Digital & Technology Innovation Manager at Chevron.

“One of the early use cases that we’ve identified is visual observations—just having Spot out there as a set of eyes to assess our assets at a more frequent rate than what we can currently do,” said Richard Hurley, an autonomous product owner at Chevron. “Spot’s integrated payloads allow us to set up automated routes and collect data day and night, regardless of how busy we are at these sites.”

Along with day-to-day monitoring and asset inspection, Chevron plans to use Spot to collect long-term historical data. For instance, the company will use lidar scanning to produce digital twins of its sites and create before-and-after scans when refineries are shut down for major equipment changes every few years.

“With Spot conducting lidar scans, we can collect data much faster and more frequently than we can using our traditional methods,” Hurley says. “It standardizes the process, and there’s a lot less error in that data collection.”

Chevron’s robotics engineers continue to look for and find new ways to use Spot and other robotics throughout the organization. Pringnitz said, “How can we get more information and better quality information with higher regularity to allow us to make better decisions every day? Dreaming about what you can do and how you could operate everything differently, and then making that dream a reality.”