The autonomous drilling system has embedded protection functions such as safe operating envelopes and fault detection, isolation, and recovery functionalities, that ensure its safe use. With the latter-mentioned safety triggers, the system is capable of detecting, automatically abnormal situations and to apply mitigation procedures. Within the project, we have extended these safety triggers with automatic functions that attempt to cure the original cause of the problem in order to put back the operation in a normal drilling state.
At the same time, within the project we address potential situations that might require to release control from autonomous to manual mode and thus we implemented into the system a management of safe mode transitions.
In this way, we address one important question related to human factors in automated/autonomous system: how to ensure a safe transition from system-controlled mode to manually controlled mode when the situation awareness of the human operator may be very low?
Our solution always takes the current context into account. The autonomous system estimates suitable states which enable the drilling operation to be safe for a few ten seconds and performs transitions to these states if necessary, in order to leave sufficient time for the human operator to take control and handle the current situation.