NASA's Mars rover has something to teach the oil industry.

Traversing the Red Planet while beaming data through space has a lot in common with exploring the deepest recesses of Earth in search of crude oil and natural gas. Robotic Drilling Systems, a Norwegian company developing a drilling rig that can think for itself, signed an information-sharing agreement with NASA to discover what it might learn from the Curiosity rover.

The company's work is part of a larger futuristic vision for the energy industry.

Engineers foresee a day when fully automated rigs roll onto a job site using satellite coordinates, erect 14-story-tall steel reinforcements on their own, drill a well, then pack up and move to the next site.

"You're seeing a new track in the industry emerging," says Eric van Oort, a former Royal Dutch Shell executive who's leading a new graduate-level engineering program focused on automated drilling at the University of Texas at Austin. "This is going to blossom."

Apache and National Oilwell Varco, both Houston-based, along with Norway's Statoil are among the companies working on technology to take humans out of the most repetitive, dangerous and time-consuming parts of oil field work.

"It sounds futuristic," says Kenneth Sondervik, sales and marketing vice president for Robotic Drilling Systems. He compares it to other areas that have become highly automated, such as car manufacturing or cruise missile systems.

Until recently, robots have been a hard sell in an industry that has long relied on human ingenuity, says Mark Reese, president of rig solutions at National Oilwell Varco.

"In the past, it's been all about, 'We need more and more people and experience, and that's the only way to accomplish this task,' " Reese said.

The 2010 BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico helped shift attitudes, said Clay Williams, chief financial officer at National Oilwell Varco. Eleven men were killed when the Deepwater Horizon rig caught fire and sank.

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NASA helps hatch robots for drilling oil without humans