ANYbotics Launches ANYmal X, a Legged Robot for Explosive Atmospheres

ANYbotics announced the launch of ANYmal X on October 27, 2026, and said the explosion-protected legged inspection robot is now shipping to oil, gas, and chemical customers including Equinor and DSM-Firmenich. The Zurich-based company describes ANYmal X as the world’s first legged inspection robot built for explosive atmospheres, designed to automate routine inspection rounds in hazardous areas that remain off-limits to standard robots.

Early Access Testing and First Customers

ANYbotics said BP, Equinor, Shell, PETRONAS, Petrobras, BASF, and SLB have tested ANYmal X since 2023 in hundreds of onshore and offshore missions under its Early Access Program. Their hands-on feedback helped refine the industrial-grade robot now being delivered. Each robot operates as part of the company’s end-to-end inspection solution, combining autonomous navigation and industrial AI with integration into existing plant maintenance software.

“Many experts thought a legged robot could never be made safe for explosive atmospheres,” ANYbotics co-founder and CEO Péter Fankhauser said in the launch announcement. “Oil, gas and chemical plants are among the most hazardous and most costly places to operate.” Fankhauser said the robot is the product of four years of engineering and more than ten patents, and he called these sectors a prime case for physical and industrial AI because their most critical areas had previously been off-limits to robots.

The Hazardous-Zone Inspection Market

ANYbotics values the global oil, gas, and chemical inspection market at $102 billion, calling it the largest market for autonomous inspection, and identifies two major operational costs behind that value: the skilled labor required for manual inspection rounds and the downtime caused by preventable equipment failures. Pumps, compressors, valves, and piping are among the critical components located in hazardous zones where standard robots are banned, so inspecting those areas still means sending people in on foot with personal protective equipment, handheld gas detectors, and entry permits.

The launch announcement states that undetected equipment failures cost the world’s 500 largest companies roughly $1.4 trillion each year in preventable downtime. It cites Siemens for an estimate that a single hour of unplanned downtime in the oil and gas sector can cost up to $500,000, and NIOSH data showing that U.S. extraction workers face a fatality rate seven times the national average.

ANYmal X is designed to take over these high-risk rounds with no facility modifications required, moving through complex industrial environments that include steep stairs and narrow walkways. Thermal, visual, acoustic, and gas sensors on the robot pick up overheating, leaks, abnormal noise, and signs of equipment wear, and each reading is logged to the asset it belongs to. ANYbotics says this gives reliability engineers a standardized baseline to track asset health over time, and that the continuous, structured observational data can enhance digital facility planning models such as digital twins.

Certification and Explosion-Protection Design

Radios, flashlights, and every other device used in these hazardous areas must be explosion-protected, with independent certification showing that a unit cannot ignite a flammable atmosphere even if something fails. The leading standards are ATEX in Europe and IECEx globally, and ANYmal X was built to meet both. ANYbotics states that Bureau Veritas, an independent notified body, examined the design and issued an ATEX EU-type examination certificate covering Zones 1 and 2, Gas Group IIB, temperature class T4, and Category 2G. The company states that IECEx certification will be available with first production, because that certificate requires an audit of the series production line, which starts after launch.

ANYbotics also states defined limits of use: ANYmal X is certified for gas atmospheres in Zone 1 and Zone 2 but is not intended for Zone 0, explosive dust atmospheres, or IIC gases such as hydrogen and acetylene, and charging and nitrogen refilling take place outside the hazardous area.

Fixed equipment usually complies by using heavy explosion-proof enclosures or by limiting electrical energy. Neither approach works for a legged robot, which needs high-power motors and a large battery in a frame light enough to climb stairs, plus exposed cameras and sensors for navigation and the ability to dock autonomously. CTO Andrea Corda said his team worked closely with the certification bodies to assess, component by component, which credible events in a walking robot’s life could create an ignition source, and he described the result as a new explosion-protection approach for an entire class of autonomous mobile robots.

The AI computer and inspection equipment sit inside nitrogen-filled sealed chambers, all twelve leg actuators and the battery carry flameproof casings, non-metallic shells insulate metallic components, conductive feet ground the robot, and automatic cutoffs watch temperature. Charging and data links run through energy barriers so no connection is exposed to the hazardous atmosphere, onboard software checks the robot’s condition before, during, and after each mission, and ANYbotics said the design was tested against shock, vibration, corrosion, solar radiation, and salt mist.

Shift Platform and Robot Specifications

In operation, ANYmal X runs on Shift, ANYbotics’ operations platform for autonomous industrial inspection. Shift schedules robot missions, organizes findings by asset, and connects with plant systems including SAP, Yokogawa, and SLB; through the Shift API, customer systems can trigger and schedule missions while inspection results and alerts flow back. ANYbotics said the Shift AI layer serves as a shared intelligence layer across four interconnected modules, keeping every reading tied to its asset context, precise location, and operational history, and that the whole system is developed and operated under ISO 27001 standards.

Chief Revenue Officer Thierry Obédé said more than 50 power, metals, and materials customers currently use this system to run over 120,000 autonomous inspections every month. He described what operators see, hear, and measure on their rounds as a third source of plant data alongside process data from control systems and business data from ERP systems, one that had always been manual and that ANYmal X now captures autonomously, even inside hazardous areas.

The protected pan-tilt inspection payload combines a zoom camera for instrument readout and visual change detection, a 640 × 512 radiometric thermal camera for hotspot and overheating detection, an acoustic imager that locates gas and air leaks by imaging their sound, and a microphone that records equipment sounds for spectral analysis and mechanical fault screening. An optional gas-sensing module measures selected combustible, toxic, and atmospheric gases along inspection routes.

Stated specifications, which the company marks as preliminary and subject to change, include more than three hours of battery runtime per charge with autonomous docking, the ability to climb 45-degree stairs, IP65 ingress protection for the robot and IP67 for the payload, Wi-Fi 6 and 5G/4G LTE connectivity with stored missions continuing offline, navigation in 0-lux darkness using onboard illumination, and continuous operation in ambient temperatures from −10 to 50 °C. The docking station and nitrogen refill station sit outside the hazardous area, and the nitrogen supply must be at least 99.9 percent pure with at most 0.1 percent oxygen.

“Having ANYmal X Ex-certified up to Zone 1 will really enable us to bring the robot very close to our process area, and that’s where you create value,” said Iskandar Al-Thani Mahmood, Manager Robotics at PETRONAS, in a statement published on the ANYmal X product page. The product page states that ANYbotics’ autonomous inspection operations analyze more than 120,000 inspections every month across more than 1,000 monitored industrial assets.

ANYbotics, SLB, and Kuwait Oil Company will give ANYmal X and its full industrial AI stack their first public showing at ADIPEC 2026. For new sites, ANYbotics said it works with each customer’s team to define business goals and the routes the robot should take over, then provides an offer, with a Business Value Assessment or an on-site demonstration available on request.