ANYbotics on September 24 unveiled a partnership with fellow Swiss firms dormakaba and LEGIC Identsystems that lets its ANYmal quadruped inspection robot open both unlocked and locked doors during autonomous plant patrols, closing a gap that has long capped the robot's reach inside secured facilities.
Fire doors gate half of a plant's critical assets
Under the joint solution, ANYmal carries a LEGIC-signed digital credential that dormakaba's ED 100 and ED 250 swing-door operators — hooked into the exos access management platform — treat like a badged employee. The robot approaches a door, presents the credential, and the operator swings the door open long enough for the quadruped to pass through. No structural retrofit is required.
"Inspection only delivers value if the robot can reach the asset, and a closed door was the one obstacle that stopped our robots from covering the most critical parts of a plant," said Jacob Euler-Rolle, product lead at ANYbotics. "Fire doors compartmentalize almost every process facility to isolate hazards, placing 30% to 50% of critical equipment behind restricted barriers."
GE Vernova named as reference deployment
GE Vernova is the launch customer named in the announcement, deploying credentialed ANYmal robots across generation-equipment plants where fire compartments and clean-room barriers have historically blocked continuous inspection routes. The trio said additional oil-and-gas and chemical customers are lined up for the fourth quarter.
An access-control angle on physical AI
The partnership underscores how humanoid and quadruped fleets increasingly depend on ancillary integration deals — power, connectivity and, now, credentialed access — to hit customers' economic thresholds. Similar back-office plumbing helped ANYbotics push the Ex-Proof ANYmal X into hazardous-area service earlier this year and let Yokogawa wire ANYmal into the OpreX autonomous-operations stack. Arm's recent Total Design for Physical AI initiative pointed at the same problem from the other end: making it easier for robots and facility infrastructure to speak the same language.
Reporting based on coverage from The Robot Report.