一年一度的钻探机器人竞赛由来自世界各地的大学生团队组成，他们设计和建造小型钻机，使用传感器和控制算法自动钻探岩石样本。该竞赛为团队提供了构建小型物理钻机或虚拟模型的选择，每个组的获胜者将在 IADC/SPE 国际钻井会议上发表论文。在 3 月 5 日于德克萨斯州加尔维斯顿举行的 2024 年会议视频中，钻机运营总裁兼 Drillbotics 联合创始人 Fred Florence 解释了竞赛如何为钻井行业培养年轻人才。

该视频还包括对参加 2023 年比赛两支获胜团队的学生的采访：穆罕默德·苏莱曼 (Muhammad Suleman)，斯塔万格大学钻井与油井工程专业的硕士毕业生；和 Charalampos Soilemezidis，克劳斯塔尔理工大学研究员。一个团队构建了一个能够远程控制虚拟钻机上的模拟井涌的系统，而另一个团队设计并构建了一个远程操作的 RSS 工具，以使用虚拟钻机引导井底组件。

The annual Drillbotics contest involves teams of university students from around the world designing and building small drilling rigs that use sensors and control algorithms to autonomously drill a rock sample. The competition offers teams a choice between building a small-scale physical rig or a virtual model, with winners of each group presenting a paper at the IADC/SPE International Drilling Conference. In this video from the 2024 conference on 5 March in Galveston, Texas, Fred Florence, President of Rig Operations and Co-Founder of Drillbotics, explains how the competition fosters a pipeline of young talent for the drilling industry.

The video also includes interviews with students who participated in two of the winning teams from the 2023 competition – Muhammad Suleman, a master’s graduate in Drilling and Well Engineering at the University of Stavanger; and Charalampos Soilemezidis, Research Associate at the Clausthal University of Technology. One team built a system that was able to remotely control a simulated kick on a virtual rig, while another team designed and built a remotely operated RSS tool to steer the bottomhole assembly using a virtual rig.