Down-hole robots: Current status, challenge and innovation

In recent years, the development and application of down-hole robots have greatly changed the way operators can intervene in deviated and horizontal oil and gas wells. Such interventions have been frequently seen in milling, drilling, brushing, measurement and inspection, or simply for any tasks oriented necessities transportation thousands of meters down-hole. More applications of down-hole robots are currently being developed and explored. Yet current down-hole robot designs are barely capable of meeting the ever increasing demand of high extended reach and payload in oil and gas well intervention, especially in unconventional oil/gas exploration such as shale gas/oil. In this paper, design principles of currently used down-hole robots are briefly reviewed. An innovative design concept of a down-hole robot is proposed and prototyped. Through analysis and experiments, it has been demonstrated that the proposed innovative design has a much larger payload and a more compact design.