Abstract
This paper examines drilling autonomy in the context of space exploration and how it might differ from autonomy required in an oil well drilling.
The main driver in the planetary drill automation is a large communication delay (i.e. the drill can not be remotely controlled) whereas in the petroleum well drilling it is reduction in manpower as well as it serves to remove human operators from a dangerous location where heavy equipment is operated 24 hours a day regardless of the weather conditions. Both planetary and petroleum drills share common problems such as data ambiguity (the same data can come from two different events) as well as a large number of data inputs that need to be processed and analyzed in real time for automation to be effective.
The petroleum industry is profit driven; thus reliability of various mechanical components is carefully optimized since higher reliability means also higher cost. In the space industry, the reliability of all systems and especially those that form a single point failure must be very high. This requires a lot of testing and makes space exploration very expensive.
Since automation is inherently expensive, a careful analysis needs to be performed in order to determine which operations may be optimized and which should not. This is because some operations are still done better and cheaper with humans.
