Thank you for the hard work and long hours by the student teams participating in the 2017 Drillbotics competition. Through two semesters you have learned things that are not in the textbooks. You experienced the thrill of invention followed by the intense effort necessary to develop your innovation into a working prototype. All of you experienced times when things did not go as planned, yet you found ways to keep moving forward. Congratulations to all of you. However, since this is a competition, we judges have to grade your overall performance as best we can. The winning team was closely followed by three other entrants, so close in fact, that we felt there was a tie for third place. The winners of the 2017 competition is as follows:
1st Texas A&M University
2nd Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s (NTNU)
3rd Tie University of Stavanger (UiS)
3rd Tie University of Oklahoma
Thank you all for a job well done.
The team from A&M is nearing completion of their SPE paper to be presented next spring at the SPE/IADC Drilling Conference. Once it is published on the SPE site DSATS will provide a link to this and other reference papers.