Verified Events
DateTypeCompanyHeadlineSegment
ANYbotics renames Data Navigator to Shift and announces October software release
- Maps, Fleet, Insight and Connect combine site models, ANYmal mission orchestration, inspection analysis and integration with plant systems.
- ANYbotics reports 120,000+ inspections analysed per month and 1,000+ industrial assets monitored; these are software operating metrics, not robot or site counts.
- Third-party robot and sensor data ingestion is scheduled for Shift 1.0; managing third-party fleets is planned for 2027. Existing customer deployments continue.
ANYbotics pilots autonomous access through controlled doors at GE Vernova power plant
- ANYmal operated for several weeks at Whitegate, repeatedly requesting access, passing controlled doors and continuing inspection routes without manual intervention.
- LEGIC supplies secure digital credentials, while dormakaba provides access management and automated door solutions integrated with the plant's existing processes.
- The partners are working toward commercial availability and are exploring elevators, gates and turnstiles as additional access points.
Flyability evaluates Ouster Rev8 lidar for Elios 3 workflows
- Elios 3 already uses Ouster OS0 lidar for mapping, localisation, flight stability and collision avoidance in GPS-denied or dark spaces.
- The newly disclosed work evaluates Rev8 range, precision, resolution and native-colour 3D data.
- The release describes an evaluation rather than a completed commercial Rev8 integration.
Exclaim Robotics raises $4.95M pre-seed
- Founderful and Playfair backed the financing.
- The Zurich startup targets routine repair and maintenance work around data-centre infrastructure.
ANYbotics opens Barcelona engineering hub for autonomous inspection robots
- The Barcelona office is ANYbotics’ third hub, joining Zurich and San Francisco, and is based at the DFactory Industry 4.0 campus.
- The site expands hiring across computer vision, machine learning, software engineering, mechatronics and DevOps.
- ANYbotics framed the hub around scaling customer programs from pilots to multi-site autonomous inspection deployments in utilities, oil and gas, chemicals, metals and mining.
ANYbotics passes 200 ANYmal robots in productive use
- More than 200 ANYmal robots were in productive use worldwide.
- SAP Field Service Management integration enabled work-order dispatch to ANYmal and inspection results back into SAP.
- The integration linked industrial inspection robots with enterprise maintenance and asset-management workflows.
Autonomous Aerial Non-Destructive Testing: Ultrasound Inspection with a Commercial Quadrotor in an Unstructured Environment
- The work presents a control and software architecture for autonomous contact-based ultrasound inspection using a commercial quadrotor.
- The system interfaces with onboard sensing and combines low-level control, force estimation, admittance filtering, and trajectory planning.
- Physical experiments use a Flyability Elios 3 quadrotor equipped with an ultrasound payload in an unstructured inspection setting.
Flyability introduces Autonomous Repeat Flight for Elios 3
- The feature enables consistent data capture across repeated inspections weeks, months, or years apart.
- The capability supports comparison-over-time workflows for detecting asset degradation in industrial environments.
GrandTour dataset paper releases large-scale ANYmal-D legged-robot perception data
- The GrandTour paper introduces a large open-access legged-robotics dataset for state estimation, SLAM, perception, and multi-modal learning.
- The dataset was collected with an ANYbotics ANYmal-D quadruped carrying the Boxi multi-modal sensor payload across indoor and outdoor environments.
- The dataset gives ANYmal-D a large-scale public benchmark for legged-robot perception, state estimation, SLAM, and multi-modal learning.
Yokogawa and ANYbotics sign partnership to integrate OpreX Robot Management Core with ANYmal inspection robots
- Yokogawa and ANYbotics signed a partnership agreement to integrate Yokogawa's OpreX Robot Management Core software with the software stack of ANYbotics' ANYmal robots.
- The integration covers both explosion-proof and non-explosion-proof inspection robots and is aimed at industrial operators in oil and gas, power, and metals.
- The partnership expands ANYbotics' position in industrial inspection through a software and deployment ecosystem relationship with Yokogawa.
Voliro appoints Gresco UAS as a U.S. channel partner
- The agreement expanded U.S. access to contact-based aerial inspection capabilities.
- Gresco was identified as a sales, deployment and support channel rather than a Voliro T end customer.
Voliro appoints Timo Müller as CEO
- Müller had helped shape the Voliro T platform and the company since its founding.
- Gutzwiller retained a strategic governance role on Voliro’s board of directors.
roboa receives Swiss Innovation Agency SIP support
- The support funds engineering work on roboa's cable-deployment application.
- The system is designed to move through confined pipe and infrastructure environments that are difficult for conventional robots to access.
- The programme adds to earlier support from BRIDGE, InnoBooster, ESA BIC and Innosuisse.
Voliro and MontiPower integrate robotic surface-treatment tools
- The partners targeted coating removal, corrosion remediation and surface preparation in hard-to-reach locations.
- Voliro said early access was expected in the first quarter of 2026; the announcement was a partnership and integration milestone, not a completed deployment.
Cerrion raises $18M Series A for manufacturing AI video agents
- Creandum led the round, with Y Combinator, Goat Capital, 10x Founders and Session VC participating.
- Cerrion said its platform was deployed in live production environments across Europe, Latin America and the United States.
Flyability released colorization for Elios 3 indoor 3D models
- Colorization adds visual context to point clouds captured by Elios 3
- The feature maps image colour onto indoor three-dimensional models
- The release updates the inspection-data workflow rather than the aircraft hardware
Flyability caged drones support Saudi Aramco internal asset inspections
- Saudi Aramco uses caged drones for internal inspection of storage tanks, stacks, piperacks and fluid catalytic cracking units, allowing data collection where people cannot safely reach.
- The approach reduces confined-space entries, work at height, scaffolding, rope access and man-lift requirements while improving inspection speed and safety.
- The programme is linked to a 2024 Exceptional Safety Achievement Award for Saudi Aramco robotics engineer Alaa BenMahfoudh, and the source cites potential inspection-cost reductions of up to 50–60% versus conventional methods.
CAN-USA used Flyability Elios drones for offshore inspection work for Shell
- Shell and CAN-USA adopt the Elios 3 UT drone with Tether Power Units for their offshore inspections
- One of these technologies is the Elios 3 UT, a collision-tolerant drone equipped with a 4K camera, powerful LiDAR, LEL gas sensor, UTM payload, and tether power unit
- Most recently, Tori has been working on Olympus, a Shell-operated offshore platform positioned 130 miles south of New Orleans
ANYbotics reports cumulative funding above EUR 127 million as Climate Investment joins
- Climate Investment joined ANYbotics as a strategic investor in September 2025; the investment amount was not disclosed.
- Contemporaneous reporting described the company's cumulative funding position as above EUR 127 million rather than a new EUR 127 million round.
- The investment supported scaling autonomous inspection robots for emissions monitoring and industrial resilience.
Flyability launches Elios 3 Tether Power Unit for extended industrial inspections
- Flyability launched the Elios 3 Tether Power Unit for industrial drone inspections.
- The tethered power accessory is designed to extend inspection duration for confined-space and industrial environments.
- The launch adds a continuous-power capability to the Elios 3 indoor inspection drone ecosystem.
Voliro secures Sixpec PEC intellectual-property rights
- The transaction concerned PEC intellectual property, not the acquisition of the Sixpec company.
- Commercial deployments span the United States, Canada, Europe and APAC, including Osprey Integrity use at a Suncor refinery.
Equinor deploys ANYmal at Northern Lights CCS facility
- The robot was autonomously running through the facility within the first week of deployment.
- Use cases include CO2 monitoring, perimeter surveys and frequent inspections at the normally unmanned site.
- The deployment places Equinor's technology into inspection, monitoring or infrastructure automation workflows beyond a lab-only setting.
ANYbotics launches gas leak and gas presence detection capability for ANYmal
- ANYbotics launched gas leak and gas presence detection capability for its ANYmal inspection robot.
- The release adds autonomous gas-sensing workflows to the company's industrial inspection stack.
- The launch extends ANYmal's role from visual and thermal inspection into hazardous-environment gas monitoring.
Voliro reaches US$23M total after Series A extension
- noa joined as a new equity investor, UBS provided the debt facility and Cherry Ventures remained the original Series A lead.
- The extension supports the next Voliro T generation, deeper cloud integration, AI-assisted inspection diagnostics, increased autonomy and additional modular payloads.
- At announcement, Voliro reported more than 40 customers in 17 countries and more than 100 contact inspections per month.
Flyability launches high-capacity batteries for Elios 3 inspection drone
- Flyability launched high-capacity batteries for Elios 3 in June 2025.
- The new battery offers up to 50% more flight time per charge.
- Flyability said Elios 3 can fly more than five additional minutes when equipped with the LiDAR Rev 6 payload.
ANYbotics launches ANYmal Research Manipulation Payload
- The payload adds mobile-manipulation hardware to the ANYmal Research platform.
- ANYbotics developed the system with Duatic.
- The named development collaboration was completed for the launch.
Parkour in the Wild: Learning a General and Extensible Agile Locomotion Policy Using Multi-expert Distillation and RL Fine-tuning
- Legged robots are well-suited for navigating terrains inaccessible to wheeled robots, making them ideal for applications in search and rescue or space exploration. However, current control methods often struggle to generalize across diverse, unstructured environments.
- Experiments use ANYmal as the physical evaluation platform.
- The reported results provide an independent evaluation on ANYmal hardware.
Real-Time Out-of-Distribution Failure Prevention via Multi-Modal Reasoning
- While foundation models offer promise toward improving robot safety in out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios, how to effectively harness their generalist knowledge for real-time, dynamically feasible response remains a crucial problem. We present FORTRESS, a joint reasoning and planning framework that generates semantically safe fallback strategies to prevent safety-critical, OOD failures.
- Experiments use ANYmal as the physical evaluation platform.
- The reported results provide an independent evaluation on ANYmal hardware.
FOCI: Trajectory Optimization on Gaussian Splats
- 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has recently gained popularity as a faster alternative to Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) in 3D reconstruction and view synthesis methods. Leveraging the spatial information encoded in 3DGS, this work proposes FOCI (Field Overlap Collision Integral), an algorithm that is able to optimize trajectories directly on the Gaussians themselves.
- Experiments use ANYmal as the physical evaluation platform.
- The reported results provide an independent evaluation on ANYmal hardware.
Voliro launches PEC payload for Voliro T
- The modular payload was made available to order, with first deliveries scheduled for April 2025.
- Voliro positioned the configuration for insulated pipes, tanks and other hard-to-reach industrial assets.
Kanadevia Inova selects ANYbotics as preferred ground-robot supplier
- The preferred-supplier agreement covers operations, maintenance and digital-service offerings.
- A successful Slough demonstration preceded the broader agreement.
Voliro T cuts Grupo DR1 chimney inspection time by 40%
- Voliro T carried a high-temperature ultrasonic probe to measure chimney-wall thickness in real time at Klabin, described by the case study as Brazil's largest packaging-paper producer.
- The drone reached hard-to-access structures without scaffolding or elevated work platforms, so the inspection could be completed while operations continued.
- Grupo DR1 reports that the process cut inspection time by 40% and reduced the setup and downtime associated with conventional access methods.
Chironix becomes ANYbotics reseller in Australia and New Zealand
- Chironix will offer ANYmal by direct sale and Robotics-as-a-Service.
- The territory covers Australia and New Zealand.
- The agreement includes local support, training and integration services.
Voliro T accelerates AssetTech wind-turbine inspections sixteenfold
- The aircraft uses a lightning-protection-system probe to take contact measurements directly on turbine surfaces without climbing or manually handling a cable.
- AssetTech says an inspection that previously took a full day can be completed in about 30 minutes, a sixteenfold speed improvement.
- The case study reports a 50% cost reduction—from about $1,000 to $500 per inspection—and roughly 95% less downtime for the turbine owner.
ANYbotics raises additional $60M to expand in the U.S.
- Qualcomm Ventures and Supernova Invest led the additional $60 million financing.
- TDK Ventures joined as a new investor alongside existing backers including Walden Catalyst, NGP Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Swisscanto Private Equity and Swisscom Ventures.
- The round took ANYbotics' company-reported cumulative funding above $130 million and supported U.S. expansion and product development.
Equans selects ANYbotics for offshore inspection services
- Equans selected ANYbotics as preferred ground-robot supplier.
- Equans plans to offer ANYmal by direct purchase or Robotics-as-a-Service.
- The scope is offshore substations and platforms; site-level deployments are not individually asserted.
Gresco adds ANYmal inspection robots to U.S. utility offering
- Gresco offers ANYmal through direct purchase and subscription models.
- The scope is U.S. power and utility inspection.
- Gresco provides local support, training and technical services.
Flyability launches flammable-gas sensor for Elios 3
- The NevadaNano sensor detects more than 14 combustible gases at 0.1% lower-explosive-limit resolution.
- It reports both gas class and concentration while the drone is in flight.
- The payload improves situational awareness but does not make Elios 3 ATEX-certified.
Constrained skill discovery paper deploys unsupervised locomotion on ANYmal
- The paper proposes constrained unsupervised skill discovery for quadruped locomotion using a latent representation over states.
- The authors report deployment of learned policies on a real ANYmal quadruped robot for zero-shot Cartesian-state reaching.
Voliro raises USD 12M Series A for aerial inspection robotics
- Existing business angels and family offices participated alongside a conventional debt facility.
- Voliro said the capital would expand its aerial-robot product offering and support wider international adoption.
- The company identified Chevron, Holcim, Acuren and Osprey Integrity as users of its robots for hard-to-reach industrial inspections.
Inspector workflow moves Elios 3 inspection data to the cloud
- The service provides online storage for Elios 3 inspection data.
- Teams can share and review mission data through the cloud platform.
- The launch expanded Flyability’s offering beyond the aircraft and payload hardware.
Flyability and Samsung sign MOU for Elios 3 indoor inspection drones
- The September 13, 2024 memorandum targets unmanned inspection of equipment and infrastructure inside Samsung semiconductor facilities to improve safety and efficiency.
- Flyability will develop and supply the systems, while Samsung will maintain and service the resulting drones and integrate them into plant operations.
- The source identifies Flyability’s Elios 3 as its latest platform, supporting ultrasonic-thickness measurement, radiation detection and surveying payloads.
ANYbotics and AWS partner on ANYmal industrial inspection workflows
- ANYbotics and AWS cooperated to make ANYmal available as an AWS Partner Solution for industrial inspection workflows, connecting robot inspection data into cloud-based industrial systems.
- ANYmal became available as an AWS Partner Solution.
- The solution targets industrial inspection data workflows.
ANYbotics and Energy Robotics partner on inspection-data integration
- Partnership links ANYmal inspection robots with Energy Robotics software.
- The collaboration was announced around ACHEMA 2024.
- Integration targets asset-monitoring and inspection-data workflows for industrial sites.
Flyability and ABS present Elios 3 ultrasonic-thickness payload
- The payload measures material thickness from the Elios 3 inspection drone.
- ABS participated as the classification-society partner.
- The collaboration covered testing and class-survey certification, not a standard configuration for every Elios 3.
Flyability and RINA announce a partnership to design training and certification programs for inspection drone pilots
- Flyability’s latest drone, the Elios 3, was launched in 2023 with 2 payloads: a radiation detection payload and a surveying LiDAR payload.
- Thanks to the training, drone pilots can help streamline inspections by providing high quality data of difficult – to – access environments.
- The training courses will be designed to optimize data collection for inspections.
Adaptive energy-regularization paper trains efficient gait transitions on ANYmal-C
- The paper proposes an adaptive energy reward for reinforcement-learning locomotion so quadrupeds can choose efficient gaits across different speeds.
- The authors demonstrate autonomous gait transitions on ANYmal-C and Unitree Go1, including stable four-beat walking at lower speed and trotting at higher speed.
- It adds meaningful ANYmal research context around energy efficiency and gait selection, not only terrain robustness.
Robotics meets Fluid Dynamics: A Characterization of the Induced Airflow below a Quadrotor as a Turbulent Jet
- The widespread adoption of quadrotors for diverse applications, from agriculture to public safety, necessitates an understanding of the aerodynamic disturbances they create. This paper introduces a computationally lightweight model for estimating the time-averaged magnitude of the induced flow below quadrotors in hover.
- Experiments use Elios 3 as the physical evaluation platform.
- The evaluation connects the reported method to Elios 3 hardware in locomotion and whole_body_control tasks.
Cygnus brings ultrasonic wall-thickness sensing to Elios 3
- Cockpit software displays the live A-scan and lets inspectors adjust gain and gates during flight.
- The probe became the third modular payload offered for Elios 3.
- The configuration targets certified ultrasonic-testing inspectors working in confined spaces.
ANYmal robot demonstrates autonomous inspection capabilities
- • ANYbotics showcased the ANYmal robot's autonomous inspection and locomotion capabilities at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas.
- • The demonstration included the robot reading visual, thermal, and acoustic signals while avoiding obstacles.
- • The event highlighted ANYmal's ability to perform autonomous missions in complex environments.
Petrobras fields ANYmal X for offshore FPSO inspection
- The program targets repetitive and hazardous inspection tasks on FPSO vessels.
- ANYbotics said ANYmal X was conducting autonomous inspection missions on a Petrobras FPSO.
- The deployment places Petrobras fields ANYmal X for offshore FPSO inspection's technology into maritime autonomy, underwater robotics or marine inspection workflows beyond a lab-only setting.
Voliro adds Acuren, MISTRAS and TEAM as U.S. inspection partners
- The partner group comprises Acuren, MISTRAS and TEAM Industrial Services.
- Voliro’s tiltable-rotor platform carries contact NDT sensors to elevated structures.
- MFE Inspection Solutions supported onboarding of TEAM to the Voliro service network.
Aker BP tests ANYmal X inspections on Valhall platform
- The Valhall test covered two decks and 70 inspection points.
- ANYmal X data was integrated with Cognite Data Fusion for mission planning and inspection analysis.
- The deployment supported Aker BP’s plan for remote inspection on unmanned offshore platforms.
ANYbotics deploys ANYmal X for BASF Ex-zone inspections
- ANYmal X conducted inspection missions across multi-level Ex-zones at BASF Ludwigshafen.
- The deployment covered visual readings, thermal checks, pump monitoring and anomaly data collection.
- The deployment places ANYbotics's technology into inspection, monitoring or infrastructure automation workflows beyond a lab-only setting.
ANYmal Parkour paper trains agile navigation for quadrupedal robots
- The ANYmal Parkour paper proposes a learned hierarchy for walking, jumping, climbing, and crouching through parkour-like obstacles.
- The authors report successful real-world transfer on hardware at speeds up to two meters per second.
- The work gives ANYmal a concrete benchmark for agile locomotion and real-world policy transfer.
ANYbotics raises $50 million Series B
- Walden Catalyst and NGP Capital led the $50 million Series B, with Bessemer Venture Partners also participating.
- Aramco Ventures, Swisscom Ventures, Swisscanto Private Equity, EquityPitcher Ventures and Verve Ventures joined the financing.
- The capital was allocated to international deployments and new capabilities for the ANYmal inspection platform.
Flyability and Mirion Technologies announce collaboration to support nuclear operators
- More information on www.mirion.com Contact: Erin Schesny at eschesny@mirion.com SEE ALSO DRONES & ACCESSORIES Elios 3 Elios 3 UT Payload Elios 3 RAD Payload
- The seamless integration of the compact RDS – 32 radiation survey meter and the Elios 3 drone enables access to remote areas that otherwise would be hazardous.
- Headquartered in Atlanta (GA – USA), Mirion employs approximately 2,800 people and operates in 13 countries.
Elios 3 maps radioactive-waste storage vault at U.S. DOE site
- The mission kept personnel outside the radioactive storage space.
- The drone collected data for the Calcine Retrieval Project.
- The operator described it as the first drone flight inside a high-level radioactive-waste vault.
Flyability raises CHF 22 million Series C for Elios 3 sensing and autonomy
- Flyability raised an additional CHF 15 million on top of CHF 7 million previously closed, bringing the Series C round to CHF 22 million.
- The financing supports development of new sensing and autonomy capabilities for the Elios 3 platform.
- The round reinforces Flyability's position in indoor inspection drones for industrial customers.
Perceptive locomotion paper validates real-time NMPC climbing on ANYmal
- The paper presents a full perception, planning, and control pipeline for optimizing all robot degrees of freedom in real time.
- Experiments on ANYmal cover gaps, slopes, and stepping stones, including dynamic climbing behaviors.
- It expands ANYmal research coverage from blind locomotion into perception-aware nonlinear model predictive control.
Flyability launches Elios 3 indoor LiDAR inspection drone
- Flyability launched Elios 3 as a collision-tolerant indoor LiDAR drone for inaccessible and GPS-denied environments.
- The standard configuration used an Ouster OS0-32 LiDAR sensor and GeoSLAM software to create survey-grade 3D models.
- FlyAware combined LiDAR and three optical cameras for real-time mapping and flight stability, while a second payload bay supported configuration-specific sensors.
PETRONAS and ANYbotics partner to commercialize ANYmal X
- PETRONAS and ANYbotics agreed to commercialize ANYmal X.
- The collaboration targets autonomous inspection in oil, gas and energy environments.
- ANYmal X is designed for Ex-rated industrial environments.
Inspector 3.0 software arrives for Elios 3 inspection workflows
- Creating these point clouds does not require expensive technology, such as LiDAR, or long processing times, such as those required by photogrammetry software.
- By allowing drones to be used safely inside buildings, it enables industrial companies and inspection professionals to reduce downtime, inspection costs, and risks to workers.
- Locational data is also essential for synchronizing and aligning the different stakeholders in a maintenance operation.
ANYbotics announces CHF 20 million Series A led by Swisscom Ventures
- ANYbotics announced the closing of a CHF 20 million Series A financing round to accelerate commercialization of its autonomous inspection robots.
- The round was led by Swisscom Ventures with participation from co-investors including Ace & Company and EquityPitcher Ventures.
- The company positioned the funding around scaling deployment of its industrial inspection robotics platform.
Elios 2 inspects Chernobyl Reactor Five
- The collision-tolerant drone crossed a 70-metre wall to enter inaccessible areas.
- Its imagery showed that the holding pools were empty and no nuclear waste was present.
- The historic mission supported reactor decommissioning and was not a standing site deployment.
ANYmal challenging-terrain paper demonstrates blind locomotion in natural environments
- The Science Robotics paper trains a learning-based controller for quadrupedal locomotion over difficult natural terrain.
- The controller is deployed on two generations of ANYmal robots in outdoor settings beyond the reach of prior published legged-locomotion work.
- The result is one of the clearest research anchors for ANYmal as a rugged field-locomotion platform.
KWO uses Elios 2 for inspection work in a Swiss mountain project
- The drone kept personnel out of a hazardous inspection area.
- Inspectors collected the visual data needed to assess whether construction could proceed safely.
- The deployment occurred at a mountain-pass infrastructure project.
Flyability and Pix4D enter partnership to accelerate the growth of indoor 3D modelling
- This offer is meant to facilitate access to a coherent and complete product offering to those who want to tackle indoor 3D modeling using photogrammetry.
- The design of the Elios 2 makes it a formidable tool to build 3D models of indoor spaces using photogrammetry.
- This course will initially be available through Flyability directly and subsequently through its Authorized Training Centers, progressively throughout 2020.
Science Robotics paper learns agile motor skills on ANYmal
- The paper trains a neural-network locomotion controller in simulation and deploys it on the ANYmal quadruped.
- It reports dynamic motor skills such as fast locomotion, fall recovery, and robustness to pushes, slopes, and uneven terrain.
- This is a landmark ANYmal result because it helped establish sim-to-real reinforcement learning as a practical route for legged-robot control.