How automation is transforming Vibroseis productivity

The true revolution in modern source management isn’t just about building more powerful vibrators; it’s about embedding them with intelligence. The latest advancements are tackling the most significant sources of inefficiency and inconsistency head-on.

One of the most impactful developments is vibrator auto-guidance. Historically, the time spent traveling between vibration points (VPs) and accurately positioning the baseplate was subject to driver skill, fatigue, and terrain variability. As our latest white paper, Source Management in the Modern Era, details, auto-guidance automates these steps. By optimizing deceleration and automatically managing baseplate lowering, this technology removes performance uncertainties. The results are striking: productivity enhancements of up to 10% from optimized travel time, coupled with positioning accuracy within a 1-meter radius. This not only delivers better data but also improves safety by managing speed and reducing driver fatigue.

Auto-guidance is just the beginning. The next leap forward is in optimizing the entire production path for a fleet of vibrators. Instead of manually following a predefined route, advanced software can now survey and model project terrain, classifying areas by their level of difficulty.

This allows for the automatic calculation of the most efficient route for the entire fleet, smoothing out shooting operations and leveling performance variations linked to driver skill. The impact on the bottom line is significant. As our research shows, vibrator path optimization can reduce source travel time by up to 20% compared to conventional guidance. In a large-scale survey, that translates to massive savings in time, fuel, and operational costs.

The wave of automation extends to the very strategy of data acquisition itself. New decentralized source control methods, like Sercel’s xDSS, are streamlining the source cycle by minimizing the radio communications that have long been a bottleneck. By removing the dependency on firing orders and source-ready messages, xDSS enables crews to achieve record-breaking productivity - reaching over 45,000 VPs per day in some cases - without compromising data quality.

And that quality is also getting an automated boost. Technologies like SmartLF are now embedded directly into vibrator electronics to tackle the challenge of low-frequency harmonic distortion. By using a sophisticated model to predict and correct the vibrator’s intrinsic behavior, SmartLF delivers a cleaner signal at low frequencies, which is essential for high-quality vertical resolution and signal penetration.