INTERVIEW WITH TYLER SCHILLING
GEMINI
A GAME CHANGER IN OFFSHORE PRODUCTIVITY
RICHIE ENZMANN: Hi Tyler, it’s been a long time since we’ve heard from you. I recall our interview with you back in 2015 about the Schilling UHD ROV. Since then a lot has happened, including the downturn in the oil and gas industry and now the pandemic. Everybody is trying to adapt, but I’ve heard rumours that you’ve been working on something new that could be a game changer for the ROV and Subsea industries. Can you please tell us more? TYLER SCHILLING: Certainly! Continuing what’s really been a 35-year trajectory of looking for ways to transform customer productivity offshore, our most recent items have been the HD and the UHD ROV. Our latest breakthrough that’s based on those prior developments is GEMINI. It’s called GEMINI because it has two identical robot arms on the front. In fact, in the developmental prototypes, one arm is named Castor and the other is named Pollux: the names of the Gemini twins. This is a very ambitious leap, and it involves a number of really important technologies, all of which are focused on allowing the work system to be on task at the worksite all the time. Furthermore, it makes successful operation of the machine and completion of these crucial tasks far easier than it’s ever been. The key technologies that we’ve adopted are, first of all, automatic tool exchange; the GEMINI system carries 30 different tools that can be exchanged automatically on either of the robot arms. Typically, it takes less than two minutes to swap out any tool on either arm, and this allows the machine to stay at the worksite (its objective is 30 days) and not have to make endless roundtrips to the surface. It’s like if you were doing a home improvement project and the DIY store was 8 hours away, and every time you needed a new tool you had to make that trip. Clearly a push button exchange of the 30 tools is a really important transformation for the industry. In fact, after less than a week on its first job, the value of this was demonstrated to the customer. The second really important technology we developed is force compliance in our robot arms. This mitigates all of the unintended forces when the tool comes into contact with
Courtesy of TechnipFMC
ROVplanet | 7
