ANYbotics ANYmal D

What it's for

ANYmal D is an inspection robot from Swiss maker ANYbotics, a quadruped for autonomous monitoring of industrial, energy and mining facilities. It has 12 degrees of freedom, IP67 protection, up to 10 kg of extra payload and a top speed of 0.75 m/s.

The equipment does the heavy lifting here: a camera with 20x optical zoom, a thermal camera (-40 to 550°C), a 360° LiDAR scanner, an ultrasonic microphone (0-384 kHz), six depth cameras and floodlights up to 3,790 lm, all run by two Intel i7 processors. The robot hears leaks, sees hot spots and lights up dark corners. The manufacturer names its target groups: industry, energy, water and gas utilities, and mining.

With a range of up to 2 km and 1.5 h of runtime, this is a robot for scheduled inspection rounds, not round-the-clock patrols. More on quadrupeds: quadruped robots, the article “Quadruped Robots: Uses in Inspection, Security and Industry”, and the use cases factories and security. Typical LiDAR suppliers in our component directory are Hesai and Ouster - without claiming that ANYmal uses them.

Who it's for

Best suited to: large plants, mines, utilities and gas companies with a budget for inspection as a service, that want to send a robot where people are exposed to heat, noise or explosion risk. Also maintenance teams that collect equipment-condition data on regular rounds.

A poor fit: small companies and schools - the price is not public and the robot is offered by quote request only. There is also no official availability in Poland. For universities or smaller sites with a simpler inspection task, the Polish MAB Robotics Honey Badger 4.0 (IP67, used in Poznań's district-heating ducts) or a cheaper quadruped such as Unitree A2 makes more sense.

Deployments

Poznań University of Technology (IRIM laboratory) has the older version B on record; that is the only Polish trace of ANYbotics that we know of.

In the inspection-quadruped category in Poland, the home-grown MAB Robotics Honey Badger 4.0 has worked in Poznań's district-heating ducts since 2023, and Unitree platforms are in use at universities (among them Silesian University of Technology and Gdańsk University of Technology). Abroad, ANYmal D works in industry, energy and mining, but we have no sourced references for specific sites.

Boston Dynamics Spot is the most frequently cited alternative. Its maker, Boston Dynamics, competes with ANYbotics in the same segment, but ANYmal's sensor package (thermal camera, ultrasonic microphone, 6 depth cameras) is designed specifically for industrial inspection. Spot's price rests on an indicative source only (about PLN 288,777 (≈ EUR 66,170)), so any cost comparison is uncertain.

MAB Robotics Honey Badger 4.0 is a Polish IP67 quadruped from Poznań, in use since 2023 in district-heating ducts and sold directly in Poland - pick it if support in Polish matters to you. Unitree B2 and Unitree A2 are cheaper platforms with payloads of 25 to 40 kg (according to the directory), available in Polish shops but without an inspection package as standard. Ghost Robotics Vision 60 is a military platform. Also take a look at DEEP Robotics Lite3 - an educational quadruped from about PLN 11,200 (≈ EUR 2,570).

ANYbotics is a Swiss spin-off of ETH Zurich headquartered in Zurich. The company grew out of research labs working on quadrupeds and has raised USD 50 million in total. Its earlier model, ANYmal B, is on record at the IRIM laboratory at Poznań University of Technology - a trace of the previous generation.

Version D is a commercial inspection robot and a rival to Spot. No launch date or list of later generations is available to us, so we do not quote them from memory.