Augmented Reality Delivers Differential Value in Safety Assurance on Rigs Onshore Abu Dhabi During Covid-19 Pandemic Courtesy of the Wearable Camera

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic posed a real challenge to business continuity of our safety assurance programs, incident investigations and training of young engineers which are traditionally conducted through physical rig site visits. The measures taken to control the spread of the COVID-19 virus meant that physical visits to the rig sites were restricted and during certain times completely stopped. The consequence of such measure meant that the safety assurance program was heavily impacted as the weekly leadership site visits were suspended. This posed a risk of a potential increase in safety incidents. Moreover, only safety critical personnel were allowed at the rig sites meaning that all trainee drilling supervisors and engineers were not allowed to visit the rig sites as part of the COVID-19 control measures. This in turn directly impacted the training program of our young engineers and trainee drilling supervisors for the entire COVID-19 pandemic period - Not Good! The potential risk of an increase in safety incidents due to lack of safety assurance was too great a cost to accept. Therefore, the drilling team started to think differently. A multi-disciplinary brainstorming workshop involving technology providers in the digital space was conducted to discuss possible ways of conducting rig site visit virtually. During this workshop, augmented reality via use of the wearable camera was flagged as a technology ready solution for our challenge. Several subsequent sessions were conducted with ADNOC Onshore IT team to build a business case for the wearable camera. The wearable camera is an intrinsically safe Zone 1 certified fully rugged head-mounted device made for harsh environments. The high-resolution micro display fits just below the user's line of sight and views like a 7" tablet. A business case was put forward and approved to conduct a proof of concept (PoC) to specifically test the ability to conduct remote rig visits, investigations and training programs. The PoC was successfully completed and allowed the team to conduct remote rig visits, audits, investigations and training programs with the "touch and feel" of being at the rig site - a paradigm shift in the way we run our business. Copyright © 2022, Society of Petroleum Engineers.