Two Japan-headquartered companies – Yokogawa Electric Corporation and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) – have been selected to undertake an AI-enabled robot system project for the Nippon Foundation. This project aims to enable autonomous operations on offshore oil and gas platforms to improve the safety of inspection work.

While workers currently conduct daily patrol and emergency inspections on offshore oil and gas platforms, this can be a difficult task due to changing weather conditions and the risk of exposure to toxic gases. As a promising solution to this problem, the use of robots is growing in the industry.