Jennifer Pallanich, senior technology editor, Hart Energy: Find out how one international oil company is using sensing and robotics technology to optimize its upstream operations in today's Tech Trends.

Rami Jabari, head of robotics and autonomous operations, Saudi Aramco: We're using sensing technology and robotics and automation technology in a wide variety of ways to address our strategic imperatives, which are related around discovery. So how do you find the resource recovery? How do we extract that resource? And then of course, doing that in an efficient manner. So operational efficiency, we're looking at it across the board, across the entire value chain as well. And our goal is to make sure that we leverage it to its full extent as safely as possible and as sustainably as possible as well.

We look at robotics from a wide perspective. The most common one, the one that's been shown recently, is an in-house development. It's called Sensor Ball. I actually have one right here. So this is a very simple 1-bit robot. Essentially it's buoyancy driven. It's in its commercialization phase right now. But this is, again, one example here.

So it's been used in a couple of our water wells so far. In the robotics space, we're looking at utilizing downhole robotics, which is a big distinction from the rest of the operators in our industry. We are looking at how we can utilize robotics downhole to make sure that we are efficiently extracting everything and fully understand what's going on in our reservoirs through the wells. And of course, similar to a lot of the other players out there, we look at everything top sides in our facilities and our operations as well.

JP: Every Tuesday, tune in to Tech Trends with Hart Energy Live as we drill into the tech that fuels the oil patch. Learn about the latest tech trends at hartenergy.com/ep.

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