ABB Robots and Oil and Gas Inspection in Hazardous Zones

From clipboard rounds on oil rigs to Zone 1 inspection robots: how ABB's explosion-safe paint robots and Robot Charger point to robot-run hazardous sites.

INDUSTRIAL ROBOTICS

Chat With Robot

9/23/20261 min read

For most of the oil age, inspection meant people. Roughnecks worked the drill floor by hand, and operators walked their rounds with a clipboard, reading pressure gauges, listening for a bad pump and sniffing for gas. On an offshore platform that walk could take hours in salt spray and noise.

Black and white photo of two oil workers handling drill pipe on a rig floor
Black and white photo of two oil workers handling drill pipe on a rig floor

Roughnecks on a Gulf Oil drilling rig floor in Texas, 1939. Photo: Robert Yarnall Richie / SMU Libraries via Wikimedia Commons (no known restrictions)

Robots were kept away because one spark in the wrong place can ignite gas. Factories dealt with the same risk decades ago in paint shops. ABB's IRB 5500 FlexPainter works in booths full of solvent vapour, and its electrics are sealed and pressurised so the air around it can't catch fire.

White ABB IRB 5500 paint robot arm with a grey print head
White ABB IRB 5500 paint robot arm with a grey print head

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

The same idea is now reaching offshore platforms. A September 17 preview of the Automa 2026 oil and gas congress describes legged robots and drones used as mobile sensor carriers. ANYbotics' ANYmal X, certified for Zone 1 hazardous areas, climbs platform stairs to read gauges, take thermal images and check for methane.

Four-legged inspection robot climbing yellow stairs on an offshore platform
Four-legged inspection robot climbing yellow stairs on an offshore platform

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

ABB's contribution would be the arm. Its paint robots already run all day inside explosive atmospheres on car lines, and that engineering could let an arm turn a valve or swap a sensor on a platform. A walking robot can report a leaking flange, but somebody or something still has to reach out and fix it.

Several white ABB paint robots with hoses surrounding a car body in a booth
Several white ABB paint robots with hoses surrounding a car body in a booth

ABB paint robots working on a car body inside a paint booth. Photo: ABB

Mining is a step ahead. ABB tested its Robot Charger with Boliden and LKAB so that nobody has to stand at the rock face loading explosives. Offshore, the Automa organisers point to subsea pipeline surveys that cost up to $400,000 and keep divers busy for about two weeks, a job I would happily give to machines.

ABB robot arm on a mining vehicle facing a rock face in a tunnel
ABB robot arm on a mining vehicle facing a rock face in a tunnel

ABB's Robot Charger, tested with Boliden and LKAB, loads blast holes so miners don't have to. Photo: ABB

I expect platforms run mostly from shore, with robots doing the rounds and people deciding what the readings mean. The sensors will keep shrinking as well. A home robot with a small gas sniffer could check the boiler and the stove each night, doing a smaller version of the old clipboard round.

Distant offshore oil platform on a grey North Sea horizon
Distant offshore oil platform on a grey North Sea horizon

An oil platform in the North Sea, where more inspection rounds could be run from shore. Photo: NAC / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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