ANYbotics launches Shift to turn inspection robots into fleet operations
The Swiss quadruped maker is betting the money in industrial robotics moves from hardware to the software layer that runs the fleet.
Swiss company ANYbotics has launched Shift, a fleet orchestration and operations platform for its ANYmal quadruped inspection robots. The platform connects a facility’s plant model, its robot fleet, inspection data, and maintenance systems into one continuous workflow, letting operations teams plan and run multi-robot missions while organizing captured field data around the existing asset hierarchy. The launch, announced October 1, is aimed at energy, metals, mining, and chemicals customers.
“Robotic inspection delivers the most value when field data flows directly into maintenance action,” co-founder and CEO Péter Fankhauser said, as reported by Robotics and Automation News. That is the commercial thesis behind Shift: inspection robots are maturing past single-machine demos, and the value — and the revenue — is moving into the software layer that schedules, monitors, and turns readings into work orders.
Shift is built around four modules. Fleet schedules, monitors, and controls the robots from one interface, with missions triggerable directly from a distributed control system. Insight fuses thermal, acoustic, visual, and gas measurements with operating conditions such as motor speed and load, so a reading only counts as an anomaly when the context says it should — not on raw sensor noise. Connect turns confirmed anomalies into work orders inside core plant software, with integrations for SAP, IBM Maximo, GE Vernova APM, Cognite, Oracle, and Yokogawa. Maps provides a live digital twin using the plant’s existing asset hierarchy. The integration runs both ways: external systems can dispatch robot missions, and results flow back into the software plant operators already use.
The company says Shift is already used across more than 200 robot deployments, processing hundreds of thousands of inspections each month. At a Vigier Cement plant running around the clock, the platform has managed more than 33,000 autonomous inspections over 16 months. Those deployment figures come from ANYbotics and have not been independently audited.
Shift will initially run as a managed cloud platform with regional data hosting, with on-premise or customer-cloud deployment available where required; existing users of ANYbotics’ Data Navigator platform transition automatically. Over the coming months, the company plans to extend Shift beyond its own ANYmal robots with support for third-party systems — which would turn the platform into a hardware-independent command center for mixed robot fleets, and let industrial AI agents assign missions dynamically through its APIs.