Building Petrochemical Plant by Robots 3

[McDermott1711]

Hi engineers,
Have you ever heard of building oil and gas plants (especially its pipeworks) by robots. How far, you think, robots can go in this field of work? Will the term "man-hour" change in this regard?

Nothing is more fairly distributed than common sense: no one thinks he needs more of it than he already has. Rene Descartes

 

[TGS4]

Define "robot"?

 

[McDermott1711]

Define "robot"?

A robot is a machine—especially one programmable by a computer—capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically.

Link

Nothing is more fairly distributed than common sense: no one thinks he needs more of it than he already has. Rene Descartes

 

[3DDave]

Yes.

 

[McDermott1711]

Thanks 3DDave for contribution!

Nothing is more fairly distributed than common sense: no one thinks he needs more of it than he already has. Rene Descartes

 

[europipe]

Maybe in the prefab phase, but otherwise never, and 3DDave, we're curious of course.
Thrilled to hear your story.

 

[TGS4]

What makes you think this isn't having already? I would include automated welders in my definition of robot, and they're already happening.

Follow-up question: define "machine" in your context. In my perspective, it's already happening and had been for many years. Or do you mean some level of autonomy that replaces rather than supplements manpower?

These questions are not intended to be flippant, but to get the the heart of what you're asking.i consider nothing to be impossible...

 

[McDermott1711]

Actually, I was imagining a pipe-rack with some "conventional" dextrose robots on it which lift pipes and other components to proper position and weld (assemble) them. Perhapse even someday Direct Metal Laser Sintering (DMLS) will be applicable.

Nothing is more fairly distributed than common sense: no one thinks he needs more of it than he already has. Rene Descartes

 

[3DDave]

The future is a big place. There's no fundamental reason to expect this kind of work will not fall to automation, so it's more of a when question.

The trick is that the bulk of the assemblers will have to be replaced all at once to prevent those little accidents that damage robots.

For example, ship off-loading is nearly entirely automated in some sea ports with significant automation. As far as I know it wasn't done on a gradual basis, but by shutting down and building new. No long-shoremen would have been involved.

I expect if some robots were placed in a construction site alongside the workers they are partially replacing, that bad things would happen to the robots. Human beings are very competitive and have spent a long time learning about and practicing destroying their competition.

A balance to that is that robots have terrible spatial analysis skills, so if something about the environment changes, robots are currently crippled. In addition, robots have terrible weight to strength ratios, particularly if their power source is included. It's why exo-suits for humans have been promised since the 1950s and still haven't made it to useful application. This gives humans a huge flexibility edge that is hard to overcome.

It's the latter section that has kept robot groundskeepers from mowing baseball fields and then striping the baselines. People readily see the actions of the controls on the mowers and the stripers and, with some practice, just do it. Check the DARPA robot challenge to see where human-sized/capable robots are today.

The other characteristic that is presently insurmountable is that human brains have a prediction simulation section. I think it is what gives people their sense of self as they predict what will happen to themselves in the future. This is an area that AI hasn't even come close to yet and I think is between 50 and 500 years in the future. Even if a robot can analyze the space and obstructions around it, it still needs to rapidly make predictions about what will happen as it moves and as other things around it move. Think of how fast a bird flying through a forest has to account for every twig and branch as well as the movement of its own wings and the likely outcomes. Humans aren't quite as fast, but they consider the possibilities years to centuries into the future.

Robots still have trouble folding a towel because they can't predict the shape it will take when they grab a part of it and they can't predict which part they should grab next in order to get the shape they want.

I expect the most likely large industrial use will be ship yards where the various sections are welded together. Every part has a generally well predicted location so spatial requirements are minimized. The task of welding has already been clearly demonstrated and access to external power, already required by the welding equipment, would allow self-relocating robots to move to where the work is. Ship building has become seriously modular so the movement requirements are low. I guess it depends on whether the competition with humans is one they can survive.

So when? 50 to 100 years before all major outdoor construction will be by robots. A shorter prediction - little kids growing up now will have their grandkids marvel at it when they see a person push a lawn mower or a long-haul truck with a person steering it.

My favorite right now are these guys:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPIyGyBNwAo

 

[McDermott1711]

human brains have a prediction simulation section.

This prediction section (which is called "prefrontal cortex", I think) is used when programming those robots.

Nothing is more fairly distributed than common sense: no one thinks he needs more of it than he already has. Rene Descartes

 

[moltenmetal]

The more repetitive the task, the more likely a robot makes sense.

Automated orbital welding equipment is the norm for autogenous GTAW welding of sanitary tubing. It's also the norm in mass-manufactured goods. But in terms of pipe and structural welding, manual welding is still king. And although there are tools which help with the fitting (i.e. multiaxis waterjet and plasma cutting machinery), most of the fitting labour is still manual too.

 

[IRstuff]

Purely autonomous robots are still a long ways off. 30 years ago, automatic target recognition was supposedly on the verge of being fielded; only now is it even close to what was envisioned, and it's still not at the point where a computer can be presented any human processable image and it can identify all the objects visible. One reason we humans get fooled by optical illusions is the shortcuts our brains make to do those types of tasks; which are still beyond the capabilities of even the best object recognition algorithms.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg

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[Zurck]

Perhaps...but only on a controlled environment set up still by humans.

 

[bimr]

The work that is currently being done by automation is the less skilled repetitive tasks. Not much petrochemical block work is being done by robotics because it takes skilled labor and the tasks are not repetitive. Some piping is being prefabricated at the present time and being robotically welded.

One would expect more work will be done in the future by robots, at least for some portion of a project. The advances made in other industries is quite interesting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDRCWnsFnC4

 

[SwinnyGG]

Robots are most successful when the task at had is EXACTLY the same down to as many fine details as possible, and the environment is very well controlled.

If it was possible to produce a standard 'oil and gas plant' design which could be repeated in every possible case, then maybe you could get there within the next 20 years or so. I'm not an oil and gas guy but I'm going to go ahead and assume that every facility, while it provides similar function, has large variances in capacity and fine detail.

The problem with automating a workflow is that unless the task is very very well controlled and repeatable, the time and money needed to program a robot or system of robots to do the work very quickly outstrips the amount of time and money needed to just send a crew to the site and do the work.

I'll give you an analogy- when you build an automated body line to assemble car bodies, the time taken to specify robots, develop a process plan, do offline programming to get close to reality, install the robots, do testing and runoff, adjust programming, then run off again to ensure consistent quality, is measured in a time scale of years, not months or weeks or days. Years.

If you had all the stamped parts already and needed to build 1 car or 10 cars, you could pay a good manual welder or team of welders to do that work very quickly. Probably in a day or less. But the point of those systems isn't to build one car, it's to build a million- and that 3 to 5 year period of work done designing the automated system takes another 5 or 10 years to pay off.

The points raised by others with regard to weight-power ratios, etc are also very valid points.

I hesitate to use the word 'never' in any context- so I will just say that robotic systems which are capable of the problem solving, improvisation, spatial reasoning, and quick learning required to do these type of tasks, at a cost which is competitive with experience human labor, is very very far away.