In its first 20 years, Schilling Robotics, propelled by unrelenting innovation, has seized overwhelming market share in its two niche markets–robotic manipulators and remotely operated vehicles (ROVs). For the next 20, its growth will be spurred by subsea controls.

Two developments have fueled demand for the string of deepsea applications Schilling now has on the drawing boards. First, scientists have already set the stage for the kind of capabilities it envisions, having planted installations on the ocean floor which can be mimicked by oil and minerals companies looking further and further offshore for new resources. The trick will be to put commercial rigor and adaptive intelligence into these new kinds of oilfield facilities.

Secondly, major oil companies are now compelled to move further offshore into deeper waters to turn up the oil they need. There is no turning back. To capture oil in the North Sea, explorers have only had to go down a few hundred feet. Now exploration teams are burrowing 1½ to 2½ miles under the surface. Suddenly they are reckoning with subsea pressures that have gone from 500 to 5000psi, involving a level of complexity some ten times greater than what came before.

The technical ramifications are formidable at these depths and pressures. Undersea wells spit out a high percentage of water, which if separated from oil and gas, can be re-injected into the reservoir to maintain desired pressures. Hydrates, which can clog up everything, either have to be kept in solution or be precipitated out of the stream and dissolved if they solidify. More and more of the whole oilfield process has to be done close to the wellhead, since it does not make sense to transmit everything back to shore for processing and treatment. As the saying goes, one only wants to ship to shore those products and that information that can be monetized. On the other hand, anything that requires an instant response must be processed locally right on the seabed. Local processing, local power generation and distribution, and local repair and maintenance become the order of the day when operating in a subsea environment.

Two scientific observatories foreshadow for us what can be accomplished by permanent installations on the sea floor. The Venus program off British Columbia (Victoria Experimental Network under the Sea), through its cable, relays data onto the Internet for use by researchers all over the world. They can also interact with it to investigate a number of changing variables. As well there are long-time observatories off of the United States and Japan, one U.S. effort known as the Hawaii-2 Observatory. A newer effort near Monterey is MARS (Monterey Accelerated Research System).

According to Oceanus, a publication from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, scientists can “design new instruments and then test them by plugging into one of MARS’s four standardized ports. Each port will support data transfers of up to 100 megabits per second–comparable with some of the fastest land-based commercial data networks. The cable also will supply up to 10 kilowatts of power–enough to supply a few terrestrial houses, and several orders of magnitude more power than can be supplied with batteries.” At these and other installations the key consideration is that extensive digital capabilities have been integrated with the installation, such that remote observers can accomplish a number of tasks.

What scientists and now exploration companies are doing is anchoring something equivalent to–or, in fact, more powerful than–space stations to the bottom of the ocean. For the oil companies these subsea facilities will amount to smart factories, which, in fact, will be more agile and require less direct human contact than the factories of the future that are now emerging on land.

Schilling’s experience and library of knowledge equip it to play a special part in these ocean factories of the future. That is, from the start, it has excelled at packaging electronics for use in the ocean deep. And because it got its start in manipulator arms, it has more than 2 decades of practical experience in remote service and maneuver at depths well removed from any human operator.

To forge manipulator arms and ROVs with broad capabilities that are economically useful for exploration teams demands both conversancy with technologies and strategic habits that are rather foreign to traditional oilfield equipment suppliers. It has been Schilling’s mission to bake digital-strength open systems into deepsea oil equipment. Its task has been akin to a generation of defense electronic companies which packed digital intelligence into the contrivances of the traditional aerospace companies–the giants known as metal benders. Even today, oilfield equipment on land and sea is just coming to terms with the digital revolution, merging interactive electronic nervous systems with its mechanical apparatus. Historically this arena has been characterized by undernourished electronics, closed software architectures, and impoverished research and development budgets. Subsea exploration and production is probably only 10% wired today. Because the oil business has been so cyclical, it has not been able to fund the long term R&D, often unrelated to today’s projects, which is critical for operations in the challenging environments that will supply tomorrow’s oil.

To that end, Schilling has devised a control systems platform that is (a) prepared for successive generations of equipment so as to extend their useful life and (b) open and capable of meshing with equipment coming from several suppliers. Because the platform can be used repetitively in generation after generation, it achieves greater and greater reliability as it is retested through the course of time. Even in a tradition bound environment, Schilling has introduced ethernet communication and is exploring cloud computing, and XML interfaces to ensure that its systems can easily migrate into wide usage and accommodate improvements that crop up in the course of time. The information flow to and from the wellhead to which Schilling is devoted is enhanced by industry standards–the wellsite information transfer standard markup language–which in itself symbolizes the information density that will characterize subsea operations of the future.

Despite the fact that exploration is effectively moving offshore and that submerged wellheads are multiplying, neither the major oil companies nor the oil equipment companies are today spending research funds that are commensurate with the challenge. Given the size of the opportunity, Schilling itself has often spent aggressively on new projects and, for the last five years, its research expenditures have amounted to about 6% of sales on average. Research outlays in the chemical and energy industries as a whole have often amounted to 1% of sales or less, according to Booz & Co. in its release of October 21, 2008.

On the drawing boards now is something Schilling calls a serviceable network gateway which is analogous to a network switch that has been battle hardened to operate in very exotic environments. That is, it can be reprogrammed and serviced from remote locations through Ethernet connections. As well, it is portable which means a ROV or an AUV can bring a new unit to an undersea installation, exchanging it for a control box that is broken. A further example of the flexibility that is built into this control package is that is capable of multiple interfaces–optical, electronic, and hydraulic. Its housing is tight, and it has few connections and seals–all elements that permit it to stay in place for long periods of time. As such, it is a durable and open digital pipeline to which companies can attach a variety of equipment and software configurations. The Company is scheduling an extensive battery of new products in the subseas controls area over the next decade. Further detail on some of Schilling’s development work can be found in “Subsea Robots Getting Smarter, Stronger,” Offshore Engineer, February 2009, pp. 46-52.

For much of the 20th century we looked to Houston’s Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center to control our adventures in outer space. It was to there that satellites and manned space vehicles beamed their vital operating data and then received back commands that guaranteed safe voyages and fruitful outcomes. Now Schilling and others are trying to give Houston the same capabilities for dealing with vehicles and installations on the sea floor. At the moment we are just at the beginning of this effort: only a fraction of our subsea oil exploration activities are digitally enabled. Schilling is trying to provide a digital pipeline open to all comers which can give oil explorers and producers hands-on control in the ocean deep.

return to top of this page -- return to Schilling Robotics Diary