Eyes on Air

Abstract

We at ADNOC Logistics & Services have identified the need for a Fully Integrated Inspection and Monitoring Solution to meet our operational, safety and security objectives. It also helped us in our journey toward becoming a world-class integrated logistics services provider. We have a mandate to manage complex logistics operations while being flexible in services delivery by adopting the latest technology and leveraging strategic partnerships. ADNOC L&S adopted autonomous drone technology from Percepto in most of its critical operations. The artificial Intelligence in the drones automatically detects abnormal changes in working environment as well as unsafe acts and conditions and helps employees be more aware of them especially during routine activities. Finally, it helps management take immediate action to address unsafe conditions as soon as they occur. Visual inspections play a big role today in asset management. In fact, they're considered a best practice for ensuring safer and more productive operations. Being able to conduct visual inspections routinely leads to early detection of issues and damages that might become failures. In this way, visual inspections ultimately help minimize incidents. Yet visual inspections are not limited to preventing and minimizing incidents, but organizations also get value from real time monitoring of procedures such as planned shutdowns of specific assets such as a flare stack inspection. During construction, having the ability to monitor work that is being conducted in real time helps minimize the overall downtime. This can translate into saving hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars. Inspections are vital and even crucial for business continuity. Yet, today visual inspection is far from being optimized. The end to end process is not at all efficient. And surprisingly, most companies and most sites still conduct visual inspections manually, not automatically. This type of inspection is labor intensive, takes a lot of time, and can even put employees at risk. Overall, manual inspection is an inefficient process. Consider the siloed workflows that comprise the overall inspection. You start with having to fetch the data and collect it. This involves sending people to the site with special equipment. It can also involve climbing up high structures or putting people into potentially dangerous positions. All of this is manual time-consuming work. When this is done, the data needs to be somehow transferred to people who are going to be analyzing it. They need to have a particular type of expertise and experience in managing visual data. Once they go over the data, they need to create or define some insights and share their findings with the relevant stakeholders. Yet again, this is a labor intensive and lengthy process. It's also costly. Fortunately, it does not have to work this way, as there is lots of room for automation. Each of the siloed workflows from autonomous capture visual data management to insights are starting to be automated. Note that typically, this is not an end to end automation. Organizations that are doing data capture of their facilities with drones, robots, piloted drones, are in most cases, automating data capture and are able to collect data more quickly, more easily without having to risk anyone. They are on the first step towards automation. Some organizations inspect their facilities with third party software that is capable of getting the data, storing it, and managing it in one place. This leaves them dependent on outside sources, which can slow the process and potentially be unreliable. Finally, there's some software solutions available that are unable to automate some of the insights. So, organizations have multiple options to begin automating inspections. Yet, none of these options provide a full holistic solution for inspection. This is where this technology comes into the picture with the AIM. AIM is the only end to end autonomous inspection and monitoring solution. It automates every step of the process holistically; from capturing the data, through managing it, all the way to sharing insights with different stakeholders. Let's look at the details related to each step of the process. First, there's automating data collection. We use autonomous robots in the form of a drone in a box. Companies have the autonomous drone on site, and they are fully operated by software. They are available as needed for running inspections. Companies can schedule inspections when they want and as often as they want – without outside assistance. This is the first step towards holistic automation. The second aspect of holistic automation has to do with the visual data management. It's not enough to automate the data collection, which is very complex in and of itself. Of what value is the data if it is not able to be used? Therefore, it's even more important to be able to gather all the data, store it in one place, tag it, and sift through it in order to eventually gain insights. And it should be easy to share those insights with relevant stakeholders from various departments. This promotes teamwork and allows everyone to feel involved in the process and add their own valuable insights. A user can simply request information for specific assets, and drones will be dispatched automatically. Plus, insights will be delivered for the user or users who requested the data. While this may sound futuristic, we at ADNOC are already using it to inspects our sites. The concept behind the operation of the AIM is fairly simple. It starts with deploying autonomous drones on site. Companies gain high quality insights with once-a-day inspection. The frequency of inspections and their consistency, because it's the same robots that go day after day and collect the data, lead to high level insights. The same robot or drone collecting data at the same time each day allows for regular comparison and strengthens anomaly detection. This is exactly what companies need - get the right insights that help ensure asset integrity, the completion of proper preventive maintenance, etc. A few concerns arise however when considering adopting an autonomous drone solution: namely - drone regulation and privacy. Drone regulators are understandably concerned about drones flying over people, operating remotely and in darkness or inclement weather, and – critically – the dangers of uncoordinated flights interfering with other aircraft. That's why when going through all the necessary requirements with all authorities in getting the approvals for autonomous to gained approval to operate drones beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS), which enabling this solution to be operated remotely without the need for an operator on site. When talking about drones and privacy, there's a huge difference between piloted recreational and autonomous industrial drones. Recreational drones cause the majority of drone accidents because they're flown by unlicensed pilots in public spaces with minimal supervision. Autonomous industrial drones fly in remote or rural locations, far from people, and have multiple built-in failsafes and advanced safety features like parachutes to eliminate injuries and mishaps. Now - let's take a deep dive to learn how drones in autonomous inspection solutions can benefit refinery inspections. We've been deploying the AIM for their end to end solution as part of our vision of creating and being part of the future. It is integrating multiple cutting edge technologies in order to guarantee safer and more productive operations. Different teams – from operations to maintenance, to emergency response and others - in our organization are getting value from having this technology. Note, the technology is applicable to any type of industrial site, construction site, and of course, oil and gas industry. Regardless, they all benefit from the autonomous inspection and monitoring technology to cater different use cases across the lifecycle, from construction of a new site, through the ongoing operation, we're using it for emergency response, and even for periodic complex projects, such as turnarounds. Companies have deployed the solution to monitor the construction of new refineries that they are building. Having the autonomous robots on site daily is especially helpful because it enables them to collect data and easily monitor what's going on throughout the construction work. It enables companies to ensure that schedules are met, verify that the work has been completed, and that it is consistent with the plans. In one instance, a company was able to recognize that contractors were not fulfilling their promise. The contractors were supposed to send a team that included a specific number of people. By having a drone provide visibility of what was going on at the site with this the supervisors were able to count how many people were on site. The supervisors realized that the actual size of the team on site was much smaller than promised. By being aware of this sort of thing and being able to verify it, whether in real time or at the end of the day, a company can make better decisions and be clear if things are proceeding according to plan. Having the drones on site collecting visual data and providing companies with visibility to know what's going on throughout the construction work. It can also help to enforce compliance with both environmental and safety standards. Consider, the drone is streaming data in real time, and generating reports at the end of the day, and/or at the end of the week, depending on the configuration done on site. The reports can be checked for things such as whether people were wearing their safety gear, their PPE, whether they were going on to restricted areas. In addition to allowing for awareness, it also it's a form of proof as to what happened on site that you can use later, should the need arise. Once construction is complete, it's time to consider o