Boost efficiency and cut costs—the oil industry’s favorite buzzwords during the latest downturn—continue to be the key talking points of the companies in the post-oil-price-crash world. The rise of technology and the crazed race for innovation and disruption in virtually any industry has not left the oil sector sitting on its hands. Oil companies are now turning to robots and drones to perform dangerous tasks in harsh offshore environments. Those gadgets save costs and improve performance, and improve safety by reducing the exposure of people to dangerous tasks and situations. In the U.S. Gulf of Mexico, no one is keener to show that they are taking safety extremely seriously than BP, after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster. BP uses a small robot , the size of a small dog, to inspect the Thunder Horse platform in the Gulf of Mexico. The so-called magnetic crawler is equipped with strong rare-Earth […]