Stefan Mileschin

We've seen some cool footage of 4 legged robots before, but up until now, finding useful work for them to do outside of niche cases like disaster response was difficult. IEEE Spectrum says that ANYbotics brought one of their ANYmal robots to an offshore power distribution platform, and put it to work. The robot can inspect parts of the platform that would normally require a human, and the contraption's 4 legs allow it to navigate obstacles like stairs and low, tight spaces with relative ease. Check out the working robot in the video below: Having said that, there are a few situations even in this demo video where ANYmal is not ideal - the poor little guy is on the short side, which makes it hard to read some of the gauges and indicators, and it looks like some electrical cabinets have to be left open for inspection since the robot can't open them itself. These things could be solved without much work with a minimal redesign to environments like this to make them a little bit more robot friendly, which seems like not too much to ask to be able to have a robot patrolling out there instead of a human.

http://www.hardocp.com/news/2018/11/...wer_statio n/