Drill Floor Robot: From Roughnecks to ABB Arms

The drill floor is the small steel deck around the well where pipe is added to and pulled from the drill string, and it is the most dangerous place on a rig because heavy iron moves around it all day. A drill floor robot takes people out of that zone. This post follows the job from roughnecks with tongs and spinning chains to the iron roughneck, then to the robotic drill floors now built in Norway and the United States, with a news hook from ExxonMobil's rigs in Texas, and asks where ABB robots could fit offshore.

Work on the drill floor of the semi submersible rig Polar Pioneer during upgrades in Tromsø, Norway, 2011. Photo: Vidar Dons Lindrupsen / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

How roughnecks worked the drill floor with tongs and chains

By the 1930s the word roughneck had moved into the oil industry for the crew who worked the rig floor, handling drilling equipment and pressure controls. A 1930 photo from Turner Valley, Alberta, shows what that meant: men in dirty overalls working pipe on the rig floor under the derrick. Every joint of pipe added to the string had to be lifted, stabbed into the one below, spun up and torqued. On a classic four man crew, one floor hand also threw the chain that spun up the connections.

Crew at work on the drilling floor of a rig in Turner Valley, Alberta, 1930. Photo: Provincial Archives of Alberta via Wikimedia Commons (no known restrictions)

In May 1939 the industrial photographer Robert Yarnall Richie photographed a roughneck connecting drill pipe on a Texas rig, with his hands on the joint. Manual tong work was one of the most dangerous jobs in drilling, and the floor hand was the person doing it: he ran the tongs and also worked the catwalk and the tugger, the small winch used to move gear around the floor.

A roughneck connects drill pipe on a Texas rig, May 1939. Photo: Robert Yarnall Richie / DeGolyer Library, SMU via Wikimedia Commons (no known restrictions)

Manual tongs never fully disappeared. A NIOSH photo from 2008 shows roughnecks in Colorado using metal tongs that weigh hundreds of pounds to join 30 foot sections of drill pipe. The first real change was the iron roughneck, a hydraulic machine that makes up and breaks out pipe connections so that much of the work can be done remotely with little manual handling. Iron roughnecks became common first in deep water drilling and were later adopted on land rigs.

Roughnecks in Colorado use heavy metal tongs to connect 30 foot sections of drill pipe, 2008. Photo: NIOSH via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Robotic drill floors in Norway and the Permian

In Norway, the push came from the offshore industry. Robotic Drilling Systems, founded in 2003 as Seabed Rig in Sandnes near Stavanger, spent a decade developing four electric machines for the drill floor: a robotic pipe handler, a drill floor robot, an electric roughneck and a multi size elevator. Its RPH 3 500 pipe handler flips pipe from horizontal to vertical, and the company says it holds about a millimetre of precision on a three metre arm lifting more than 3.5 tonnes. RDS developed the system with Siemens for new and existing onshore and offshore rigs.

A semi submersible drilling platform at a shipyard in Ølensvåg, Rogaland, Norway, 2010. Photo: W. Bulach / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

On land, Nabors launched its Canrig Red Zone Robotics (RZR) Rig Floor Module in 2022. It was retrofitted to the X29 rig, which drilled horizontal wells for ExxonMobil in the Permian Basin, and it allows hands free pipe handling with no crew member on the floor or in the derrick. It makes drilling connections and trips pipe in and out of the hole on its own. Reuters reported on 24 August 2026 that two of Exxon's more than 30 Permian rigs are automated, and the company wants half its fleet automated by 2028.

The drillship West Capella in Brunei Bay, April 2025. Photo: Calistemon / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

On those rigs a contractor in a small office uses screen controls to move pipe weighing roughly 2,000 pounds, while robotic arms position each stand and connect it to the drill string. A gate marked "Red Zone" keeps people off the floor. Exxon's first automated rig, supplied by Helmerich & Payne, drilled two miles horizontally in a little over six days. ABB is not part of these systems, and no source we found shows ABB robots on a drill floor. Robots for hazardous oil and gas inspection are a separate story we covered earlier.

An ABB IRB 5500 paint robot, a design built to work in explosive paint booth air. Photo: ABB

Where offshore drill floor automation is heading

Purpose built machines will keep lifting the drill pipe itself, because a 2,000 pound stand is far beyond what general industrial arms carry. ABB arms could still fit around them as a possibility. An IRB 5500 paint robot is designed to work in explosive paint booth air, and that design approach is close to what a gas hazard zone on a platform requires. A large arm like the IRB 6700 could handle tools, thread protectors and smaller components that crews still carry by hand.

An ABB IRB 6700 lifts a solar module for a folding roof at dhp technology. Photo: ABB

Offshore conditions are harder than a factory: salt spray, drilling mud, vibration and a deck that moves. An IRB 1300 with Foundry Plus 2 protection is built for water and dust, which is one step toward that environment, though not the same as offshore certification. Any such cell would be designed and tested first in RobotStudio, with SafeMove zones keeping the arm away from people, and it would need approval from the rig owner and the regulator before it went near a live well.

An ABB IRB 1300 with Foundry Plus 2 protection, built to handle water and dust. Photo: ABB

The open problems are cost, reliability and skills. A robotic drill floor has to handle every pipe size and tool a well needs, and when a machine fails on a remote platform the rig waits. Exxon's senior vice president Bart Cahir says that people taken off the rig floor can think ahead and plan the next operation, and he calls that "the productivity play". The skills shift with it, from handling pipe to running and fixing the machines that do. Legged inspection robots such as ANYmal X are already certified for hazardous zones on platforms. On Exxon's automated rigs the floor crew already works from a screen in a small office, and that is the likely direction for offshore rigs too.

ANYmal X, a Zone 1 certified legged robot, climbing stairs on an offshore platform. Photo: Cvoellmy / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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