Cutting-edge technology to help self-driving cars avoid obstacles might seem a world away from the floor of a drillship hundreds of kilometres off Africa, Norway or the US Gulf coast.

But drilling contractor Seadrill and the Marsden Group, a technology research and development company, have developed a system using a similar approach to manage personnel in hazardous “red zones” offshore.

The technology is designed to keep workers safe in a space full of complex moving pieces of heavy equipment.

The technology, Vision IQ, combines advanced vision processing cameras, laser-based light detection and radar (LiDAR) technology and artificial intelligence to avoid collisions.

Seadrill plans to install the technology on 12 of its rigs starting next month.

However, the product is not proprietary to the rig contractor, and its designers have aspirations for it to scale up and gain wider traction in the industry.

Maersk Drilling has also participated in an early adopter pilot programme.

“Our business priorities are focused on our humans,” Jennifer Hohman, chief information officer for Seadrill, said during a presentation on the product.

“What we’re now trying to do is leverage technology to inform not only people on the platform, but people watching the platform, to provide alerts to people so they can stay safe.”

The final product, well over a year in development, is a slick-looking triangular unit not much bigger than a cereal box. It takes about three small mounted units to cover a rig floor, and operation requires only a power supply.

But developing the technology was far from simple, explains Andy Pratt, president of the Marsden Group, which carried out R&D work in a range of industrial applications, including energy.

The technologies that go into the Vision IQ system are being used in a variety of industries, from robotics to consumer goods. However, there are “huge barriers” for use in the oil and gas space due to the intensive testing process required for certification of equipment used in environments that have a potentially explosive atmosphere.

Marsden gained certification for its Houston facility so that it could carry out manufacturing in-house.

A key early step was to decide which technologies would work best in the drilling floor environment to detect the presence of workers in unsafe spaces.

One approach tried early on was radio-frequency identification (RFID), a technology often used in logistics that uses tags to track objects.

However, that technology turned out not to “like metal and water very much,” Pratt says, making it a poor match for offshore operations.

There was also the problem of getting people to remember to wear the right tag or uniform — or remembering not to put delicate materials through the washing machine.

Namely it was important to the developers that the system help prevent accidents with anyone — even a novice employee or visitor — regardless of what they were wearing, their experience level or knowledge of procedures.

The next approach came through the study of vision camera systems, currently an area seeing massive growth within technology R&D.

That technology did a great job of identifying objects such as people.

However, the approach required a massive amount of computing power when it came to pinpointing distances — crucial when the difference between a safe and unsafe area can amount to a foot or less.

Next they tried LiDAR technology, which gave “crazy accuracy” as to the location, plus or minus half a centimetre, Pratt says.

Ultimately, Marsden opted for a solution combining the cameras and lasers in a safety system that includes native redundancy.

The system uses an alarm that signals when someone is in a potentially hazardous position and that grows more insistent as the danger increases.

The system can also track whether its procedures and paths for moving around the rig floor are actually being followed, and if not, try to identify the reason, such as an obstacle that is not noted.

Once Marsden had pinpointed its approach, it started to make prototypes to test the equipment.

When the designs and prototypes were finished, the group proceeded with destructive testing, baking their lovingly crafted systems in ovens for more than 30 days and smashing them up with hammers.

The first drilling unit to test out the technology was the Seadrill West Neptune, which has been under contract to Llog Exploration in the Gulf of Mexico.

Testing was to wrap up this week with batch production due to begin in October.

Looking forward, Marsden aims to use similar anti-collision technology on a proprietary basis with Seadrill for a range of rig operations.

However, it also aims to further explore the market for the safety system, building economies of scale, with the goal to make the technology affordable enough to go out on many more drill floors.

“This is not about competitive advantage, this is about people,” Pratt says. “This needs to be out, this needs to be open.”

John Alvarado, director of Seadrill Solutions, said initial briefings with clients have been positive.

“The interest is very high, everybody seems to be very quickly adapting to it and wanting it to be applied as quickly as possible,” Alvarado says, adding that there has even been interest in the application for onshore rigs.

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Vision to drive offshore safety