Congratulations to the NTNU Drillbotics team - Luis C Alvarez, Mikaela Solberg, Jarle Ness and Henrik Helgeland - the winners of 2022 Drillbotics competition! Drillbotics is SPE International Student Competition in Autonomous Drilling (www.drillbotics.com). The team built, programmed and operated a fully autonomous lab-scale drilling rig that successfully drilled a directional well through multiple downhole targets. NTNU wins the competition for the 3rd time and is the only university with such a track record. This success is a result of innovative education, research and collaboration between the Department of Geoscience and Petroleum and Department of Engineering Cybernetics in the #BRU21 program.
 
The team was supervised by Alexey Pavlov (team lead, petroleum cybernetics), Sigbjorn Sangesland (drilling engineering), Dr. Tor Berge Gjersvik (drilling engineering) and Lars Imsland (cybernetics). Special thanks to the team sponsors: BRU21, Equinor, Lyng Drilling and to the technical support from IGP Laboratories, Noralf Vedvik
 

The NTNU Drillbotics team supervised by BRU21 goes to the finals and is ranked #1 after evaluation of reports for Phase 1 of the 2021-2022 competition!

Drillbotics is an international competition between universities organized by the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE). The challenge is to design, build and successfully implement a fully functional drilling rig at lab scale in order to perform fully autonomous directional drilling through a rock sample. The aim of the competition is to promote the application of digital solutions and autonomous systems into drilling operations.  This will bring innovation and technology development from the academy which can be applied at an industrial scale

Final tests will be held in May and June of 2022 in Houston and Celle. The Team consist of Mikaela Solberg, Luis Alvarez, Jarle Ness and Henrik Helgeland. Congratulations!

Luis and Mikaela are happy with the #1ranking

The NTNU Drillbotics Team won the International 2020/21 SPE Drillbotics competition

Magnus Steinstø, Benedicte Gjersdal, Gaute Hånsnar, and Trygve Mikal Viga Skretting has since 2020 worked hard to build, program and operate a robotic mini-rig for fully autonomous drilling of directional wells.

The Drillbotics Challenge Committee gave the following reason for the NTNU team winning: “NTNU demonstrated an understanding of rig design, drillstring dynamics and the physics of directional drilling. They also designed their own bit, BHA and downhole measurement sub. The Drillbotics challenge committee is looking forward to seeing even further advancements made to the autonomous steering and directional drilling decision-making systems in future competitions”.

 Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) is the only university that has won the Drillbotics competition twice. Congratulations!

 The NTNU Drillbotics team is supported by yhe BRU21 program at NTNU, Equinor and Lyng Drilling.

Read the announcement from Drillbotics here

The competition started out with an interesting Q&A-session, where the Team were able to showcase what they have learned throughout this year. After that it was time to prove their design through a drilling demo with respect to the committees requirements. The drilling was so successful that the committee requested a "show-run" to maximize the performance of the rig! This run surprised the committee by drilling through a 60cm rock in 6 minutes and achieving an inclination of 35 degrees. The competition was hectic, but very fun and the Team thought it was good to be able to show the results of very much hard work. The final scoreboard will be presented in a month or two, but we have our fingers crossed.

NTNU Drillbotics team are building and programming a rig for autonomous drilling of deviated wells. 

NTNU Drillbotics team are building and programming a rig for autonomous drilling of deviated wells. The NTNU student team are sponsored by BRU21 and Equinor, and is in the finals of the international Drillbotics competition organized by SPE and pre-ranked #1 by the jury!. We wish the good luck in the competition 7.June! Read more about Drillbotics here https://drillbotics.com/

Behind the great work from the Drillbotics team there are many helpers. The technical staff at the Department of Geoscience and Petroleum at NTNU represented by Håkon Myhren, Noralf Vedvik and Terje Bjerkan has been crucial for a good result in the 2021 Drillbotics competition.

In the picture (from left): Professor Alexey Pavlov, Håkon Myhren, Benedicte Gjersdal, Noralf Vedvik, Magnus Steinstø, Terje Bjerkan, Trygve Mikal Viga Skretting and Gaute Hånsnar