First ANYmal C Legged Robot Customer Deliveries

ANYbotics is proud to announce that the first production batch of ANYmal C robots has been delivered to engineering partners and research customers worldwide. This marks a significant milestone for ANYbotics as a mobile robot manufacturer as well as an important step in revolutionizing the industrial inspection and maintenance workflow. Since the launch of the new ANYmal C robot last year, the ANYbotics team has been focusing on a growing number of partnerships with several key industry vendors and operators. Through performing test installations and pilot projects for diverse inspection tasks, ANYbotics is preparing for completely unsupervised installations.

A new batch of the new generation of ANYmal C robots straight from the production line.

Since its market launch, ANYmal C has caught the eye of key players in the energy, chemical, mining and construction industries that target to bridge the gap between their digitalization needs and existing solutions. Manual data collection by human inspectors is an effortful and error-prone task, especially in large-scale, remote or hazardous environments. Achieving full coverage is very challenging with fixed sensors and problems such as leakages, rust, hotspots, and missing equipment are hard to detect without human intervention. Having autonomous mobile robots on-site will fundamentally change the inspection strategy of operators by elevating the digitalization of industrial plants to a new level.

Making offshore operations safer and more efficient is key to the future development of the energy industry. Together with one of its partners, ANYbotics is combining its expertise in building four-legged robots with challenging operation needs during a multi-week autonomous offshore deployment of ANYmal C. This follows a successful proof-of-concept, where ANYmal C performed routine inspection tasks to monitor machine operations, read out sensory equipment and detect thermal hotspots and oil or gas leakages, proving the capabilities required for offshore deployment. “Reducing monitoring tasks will reduce our need for operators to conduct inspections, which not only moves people away from dangerous processes, but also significantly lowers the cost of our offshore operations.”, mentioned the CTO of an energy company collaborating with ANYbotics.

With the ANYmal C four-legged robot, the company is able to perform autonomous routine inspections on their offshore platforms and consistently receive reliable equipment and environment data. Initially installed on a manned platform, ANYmal C will be eventually deployed on unmanned platforms. These are designed to be primarily operated remotely, without the constant presence of personnel. However, most plants still have to be visited weekly, generally for inspection and maintenance, and particularly for unplanned shutdowns caused by dangerous weather conditions. “Our goal is to reduce human intervention on our unmanned platforms, but sometimes the value from the sensors could give false information, so visual confirmation is extremely important and would provide additional confidence to our operators”, added ANYbotics’ partner spokesperson.

The ANYmal C robot autonomously inspecting equipment health on an onshore energy platform.

The close collaboration with industry partners is extremely important in understanding how ANYmal C can be of most value to ANYbotics’ customers not only in making daily operations safer and more efficient, but also in increasing equipment uptime and process quality. The ANYmal C legged robot is available for sale and now also for rent to customers interested in developing applications with autonomous mobile robots and to robotics research organizations. For industrial end users interested in evaluating the potential of ANYmal, ANYbotics provides proof-of-concepts and pilot installations worldwide. For any questions or inquiries, please contact ANYbotics.