Five UiS students made it all the way to the top in their group in the Drillbotics contest.
The Virtual Rig contest was held on June 28th 2021. Three teams were able to fight through the pandemic. Of the 21 teams who signed up for the contest, only three final competitors made it to the end of phase 2: UofC, UMaT, and UiS. The Drillbotics committee was pleased to see teams with undergrads with little or no training in modeling achieve considerable progress towards the difficult task of simulating the rig and the directional drilling process. For all the team members, the integration of a number of modules into a comprehensive model was challenging.
The winning team from the University of Stavanger were led by Luis Saavedra. The team also includes Rishyank Chevuri, Melissa Magalhaes, Fazlul Haque, and Miguel Fernandez plus Samiul Ehsan and Renan Ruiz. Professor Dan Sui has been their advisor.
UiS provided a complete model with directional drilling specific considerations such as drilling target tolerances and positional uncertainty. They exceeded the judges’ expectations with their web interface that included dedicated modeling modules, as well as data visualizations that emulated “real time” drilling traces.