Virtual reality techniques for planning the offshore robotizing

Remote locations such as ultra-deep water reservoirs (400 m or deeper) have been increasing the production complexity and logistic costs for Oil & Gas industry. In such conditions, oil exploration feasibility depends on new technologies to optimize production efficiency. One possible solution to this challenge is to increase the degree of automation in production units. New design concepts consider the use of robotic devices in such scenarios. In this paper we present the use of virtual reality techniques in a robotics framework, SimUEP- Robotics (Robotics Simulator for Stationary Production Units), aimed to enable planning the offshore platform robotizing. SimUEP-Robotics has an integrated Virtual Reality Engine specially tailored to provide realistic visualization of large offshore scene models in an immersive environment. Through the use of those visualization tools it is possible, for example, to better understand the quality of the planned robot trajectory and propose new algorithms that can be further evaluated in the virtual environment. We argue that the validation process in an immersive virtual environment reduces risks and costs of real operation tests scenarios.