On Wednesday’s evening, 16^th of October we attended a 4^th Robotics and ROS in Zurich meetup. I was our first meetup after the summer break. This time, it was co-organized by ICCLab and ANYbotics. ANYbotics provided their office space for the meeting and demo. We managed to gather together around 50 interested attendees.

Everything started with a short introduction talk and agenda presentation by Giovanni Toffetti. After that, the ANYbotics team gave a 30min long presentation about their flagship robot – ANYmal C.

Peter Frankhauser, the CBDO of ANYbotics, started by explaining the current state of the art of mobile robots and presenting possible paths where the robotic industry is going to expand in the future. He showed that by analyzing the history of the mobile robotics industry we can spot a transition from robots performing repetitive tasks (automation), started by the third industrial revolution in late 60s, to autonomous robots used to operate in large storehouses (logistics). The autonomy of logistic robots is somehow limited only to controlled environments, so by drawing a trend line, we can spot the next breakthrough waiting to be reached by mobile robots: the possibility to operate autonomously in “robot unfriendly” environment. The use-case presented by ANYbotics team is the task of routine inspections in places like offshore power plants or oil platforms. Later on, two engineers from ANYbotics, took over the presentation and dived more deeply into technical details about how they managed to adapt their robot to harsh environment and what kind of challenges they faced.