Four-legged mobile robot wins award in Australia

The International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) is the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society’s flagship conference and is a premier international forum for robotics researchers to present their work. The conference brings together experts in the field of robotics and automation for technical communications through presentations and discussions.

The conference features a startup competition – the Robot Launch Startup award where ten startups pitched to the jury and the audience in contest for a prize of $3000 AUD and potential investment of $250’000 from the Robotics Hub Fund. The winner of the challenge is ANYbotics, a spinoff of the Robotic Systems Lab (RSL) at ETH Zurich for its product ANYmal.

ANYbotics is developing the market for highly mobile-legged robots operating in challenging environments. By so doing, the startup responds to the rising need for solutions to address some of the challenges in the robotics industry including mobility – to allow robots to cope with steps, gaps, obstacles and rough terrain – interaction and autonomy.

With ANYmal the startup responds to this challenge. ANYmal is mobile robot system and an electrically driven four-legged autonomous robot platform satisfying the most advanced mobility requirements.

ANYmal moves and operates autonomously in challenging terrain and interacts safely with the environment. As a multi-purpose robot platform, it is applicable on industrial indoor or outdoor sites for inspection and manipulation tasks, in natural terrain or debris areas for search and rescue tasks, or on stage for animation and entertainment. Its four legs allow the robot to crawl, walk, run, dance, jump, climb, carry – whatever the task requires.

With the help of task-specific payloads, ANYmal opens up endless application possibilities. The robot features a dedicated payload hardware interface and an integrated application computational unit. A range of software APIs allows for tight integration with existing and new devices and systems.

The Video illustrates how ANYmal operates.

(RAN)