ANYbotics, a Swiss robotics company, has dedicated itself to this task with the vision of shaping a safer future for industrial inspection. A future where robots act as autonomous members of the inspection team and seamlessly integrate inspection operations into plant maintenance workflows.
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This vision finds its concrete realization in “ANYmal”: a four-legged inspection robot specially designed for use in heavy industry.
“Unlike universal robotics platforms, ANYmal is designed to operate in “big, dirty, dusty and dangerous” areas,” says Nicole Zingg, Director of Technology Partnerships at ANYbotics. Places where stairs, corrosion, heat and unreliable connectivity are not exceptions, but the norm.
“But hardware,” Zingg adds, “is only one piece of the puzzle that makes ANYmal an indispensable helper for customers.”
Inspection robotics – it’s all about data
“We are building a hardware platform,” explains Zingg, “but inspection robotics is first and foremost about consistent and reliable data.”
ANYmal navigates independently through industrial plants, collecting data that goes far beyond what a human could collect alone. The walking robot not only carries out a visual inspection. Its sensors also collect multimodal data. Using thermal imaging technology, ultrasound and acoustic sensors, it is able to locate leaks, measure gas concentrations and detect anomalies. These observations are incorporated into what ANYbotics calls “Inspection Intelligence”. The collected data provides actionable information. The result: longer plant uptimes and lifecycles and, most importantly, significantly safer working conditions for people.
The use of ANYmal can have far-reaching effects on operational processes. “One customer in the offshore wind energy industry used ANYmal to carry out all inspections, eliminating the need to send personnel to a remote platform for months at a time,” says Zingg. When human intervention was finally required, the data collected by ANYmal from the previous inspections made all the difference. The customer already knew exactly what was wrong, which expert to send and what equipment to bring. This avoided costly and risky site visits that would otherwise have been based on assumptions.
For ANYbotics, however, providing this information is not enough. It must also be integrated into the software systems used by customers.
“ANYbotics must be natively deployed in SAP environments.”
In extensive user studies, ANYbotics found that many plant operators, maintenance managers and field service teams already use SAP in their daily business operations. Work orders, equipment history, performance trends and decisions – all of this data passes through SAP systems. “When customers use SAP, ANYbotics needs to be deployed natively in SAP environments,” explains Zingg.
Meanwhile, the SAP Embodied AI project team was looking for robotics companies to work with SAP. The aim of this project is to extend SAP Business AI to physical operations. This involves equipping robots with cognitive capabilities so that they can perform complex tasks autonomously while understanding the overall business context.
It was clearly a perfect fit and has benefited both companies.
On the system side, an end-to-end digital thread ensures that insights from ANYbotics’ industrial inspections flow seamlessly into SAP systems – supporting key business and operational decisions across the organization.
The direct integration of ANYmal into familiar SAP workflows can help drive adoption among end users, as the use of robotics can cause anxiety among already busy industrial workforces. “Concerns are raised about workplace safety, workflow disruption and complexity. But when ANYmal is integrated into familiar SAP workflows, this can help to alleviate such concerns,” explains Zingg.
Robots as part of the workforce
The first key integration point was SAP Field Service Management. Instead of just sending human technicians, customers can now assign work orders directly to ANYmal – just like any other member of the field service team. The robot then carries out inspection tasks independently, collects data and reports the results directly back to the company’s SAP system.
Originally, the integration was only used for certain systems. It is now being expanded further via the SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP). This means that the data generated by the robots can be made available flexibly wherever customers need it in their SAP landscape.
The aim is not to force humans to adapt to the robots, but rather for the robots to adapt to human workflows. “ANYmal has to enter data into the SAP system, just like human team members,” emphasizes Zingg. ANYmal becomes another worker in the same operational data entry system.
“Project Embodied AI” in practice
This combination of robot technology from ANYbotics and SAP bridges the gap between physical processes and business applications – and expresses the goal of “Project Embodied AI” in concrete terms.
On the SAP side, AI agents work on ANYmal’s robotic systems to perform physical tasks such as safety checks.
On the ANYbotics side, ANYmal is a physical object that moves through space, perceives its environment and takes real-world constraints into account. ANYmal uses historical data and time series data from SAP to make informed decisions – and remains completely autonomous even in disconnected environments.
“It’s important to remember that ANYbotics is in control of ANYmal’s behavior and inspection execution, while SAP is in control of the business context such as work orders, asset data or operational priorities,” says Zingg. It is the SAP business context that determines how ANYmal’s insights are used and acted upon, while ANYbotics controls ANYmal’s physical interactions.
Scale safely and responsibly
Today, more than 200 ANYmal robots are already deployed around the world, performing inspections in heavy industrial environments where a constant human presence would otherwise be required.
Safety remains a key concern for ANYbotics. Extensive testing is carried out on every deployment and there is always a service engineer on site to help ANYmal familiarize itself with its environment and train operators in safe operating procedures. While ANYmal is designed to work autonomously, humans remain firmly on board.
A glimpse into the future: industrial inspection via AI
With many industries struggling with skills shortages and the challenges of an ageing workforce, undocumented expertise is all too often lost. With autonomous inspection robots such as ANYmal, this knowledge is captured and transferred into programs that can be executed day after day at multiple locations. The data obtained flows into SAP and thus becomes corporate intelligence that is permanently retained regardless of personnel changes.
The partnership between ANYbotics and SAP shows that this combination of robotics and enterprise software enables a rapid transition from the experimental phase to practical use.
In the future, industrial inspection will be AI-supported – not in the form of decoupled dashboards or isolated machines, but as an integrated intelligent system in which physical robots and digital workflows within the SAP landscape mesh seamlessly.
Robots like ANYmal will no longer be novelties in the future. They will be colleagues – albeit mechanical quadrupeds – that extend human capabilities to areas that have always been inaccessible to humans. These robots – together with SAP – are shaping a future where industrial inspections in dirty, dusty and hazardous environments deliver accurate data that is transformed into business-value insights.
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Further links
👉 www.sap.com
Photo: SAP
