A Swiss-designed, autonomous, four-legged robot has been put through its paces on a converter platform in the German North Sea.
The robot, called ANYmal, performed various inspection tasks on the platform as part of a week-long pilot guided by Dutch-German transmission system operator TenneT.
It was designed by ANYbotics, founded in 2016 as a spin-off from ETH Zurich with the goal to develop the market for highly mobile legged robots operating in challenging environments.
ANYmal performs routine inspection tasks to monitor machine operations, read out sensory equipment and detect thermal hotspots and oil or water leakages.
Whenever required, ANYmal can be remotely operated from an onshore control centre for TenneT to receive real-time information through the robot’s onboard visual and thermal cameras, microphones and gas detection sensors.