Abstract
Reliable toolface calculation is essential for achieving robust automatic steering control with rotary steerable systems (RSS). For RSS with fully rotating sensor packages, this task becomes particularly challenging under extreme conditions, where signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of measurements from one or more sensors reduce significantly (e.g., while drilling near-vertical wells, along dip, towards magnetic north, in the vicinity of casing and/or under severe vibration and stick-slip). To ensure robust toolface control for fully rotating RSS under these conditions, this paper proposes a novel dynamic toolface calculation method.
The proposed dynamic toolface calculation method of the new-generation fully rotating RSS overcomes the challenge of achieving robust toolface control despite extreme drilling conditions, by bringing together real-time health monitoring, online sensor calibration and novel sensor fusion techniques. Considering that robust toolface control is the heart of any drilling automation architecture with RSS, this technology is key to enable advanced drilling control strategies in the future.