Joseph Morgan, technology associate of robotics and advanced industrial practices with Dow Chemical Company is proud of his company's drone and robotics program.
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Josh Buchanan, inspection and asset engineer with Chevron (left); Shankar Nadarajah, materials integrity technology group lead with ExxonMobil and Joseph Morgan, technology associate of robotics and advanced industrial practices with Dow.
"My group and I do advanced ways of traditionally heavy, industrial practices, and drones and robotics are one component of that," Morgan said. "We have a very robust drone and robotics program, and we are looked to as 'the leaders of the pack' in the way we operate and integrate drones and robotics into our typical operations and responsibilities."
One basis for that pride is the program's dedication to the welfare of Dow employees. "We use advanced ways of doing work to keep our employees safe, first and foremost, and second, is to generate competitive advantage," Morgan said.
Discussing how to best manage an effective Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and robotics programs at the Energy Drone and Robotics Conference, held recently in The Woodlands, Texas, Morgan said mainstreaming processes and keeping them as simple as possible is the best way to generate that competitive advantage.
"We're really pivoting out of the 'wild west' territory into more of a structured environment. We've got to get into that typical mode of thinking about aviation safety and aviation risk management, but at the same time, accelerating our usage across our global operations," he said.
Joshua Buchanan, inspection and asset engineer with Chevron, agrees with Morgan's point about the pivotal role of simplification.
"We have hardware manufacturers, software developers, and service providers. Simplifying does not mean trying to do everything yourself," he said. "Simplifying means understanding your role in the entire ecosystem, and workforce. When I engage with third parties, I ask them, 'How do you fit in to this picture?' If you have a clearly defined scope, you understand how you fit. That's step one."
The second step, Buchanan said, is determining how parties can better collaborate with each other.
"That's how we get to the simplification so that we can truly scale up and extract the full proposition associated with these workflows," he said.
Buchanan touted Chevron's approximately 13 in-house programs, over 120 in-house pilots and 150 in-house owned and operated Unmanned Aircraft Systems.
Buchanan said it's important that leadership understand the value of these programs.
"I'm often asked by management, 'Why are we doing this?' My response is, 'Well, it's complicated.' This is a complicated space. It's an opportunity to standardize, organize and, most importantly, educate so people understand the complexities involved.
"I think a lot of our end users need help to understand what it takes to grab a drone and throw it in the air," Buchanan continued. "There's a lot of steps that go along with it from capturing data, managing it and then generating insight."
Shankar Nadarajah, materials integrity technology group lead with ExxonMobil Energy and Chemical Products, capsulized ExxonMobil's most important purpose.
"Our job is to safely and responsibly bring these products to meet the energy needs of the growing world market," he said. "This is where our drone strategy and program have really been at the forefront of our way of doing that."
Nadarajah said he has witnessed firsthand how a lot of work in the field and in inspections had been done. "We wanted to see how we could use and leverage this technology, and draw on other robotics to help us do this work more safely and efficiently."
ExxonMobil has scaled up its drones and robotics program in its engineering and technology organizations. In 2022, Nadarajah said, the focus has been on automation, with an emphasis on increasing efficiency in automating data capture.
"We're trying to bring the lowest cost supply into the market for energy, and to do that we have to figure out how to be more efficient in how we do a lot of our operations onsite in inspections of key areas," he said.
