Picture an offshore oil platform in rough seas, a chemical plant with a potentially explosive atmosphere, or a sprawling mine. These are places where sending a person to read a gauge or listen for a faulty pump is slow, costly and sometimes dangerous. ANYbotics, a Zurich-based robotics company, built a four-legged robot to do that work. Doing it at scale, though, takes more than a good robot. It takes a cloud platform that keeps a fleet of machines connected, supplied with missions and feeding useful data back to the people who rely on it. For ANYbotics, that platform is Amazon Web Services (AWS).
This article covers what ANYbotics builds, why a robot company needs the cloud and how the AWS relationship works.
Introducing ANYmal
ANYbotics’ flagship product is ANYmal, an autonomous inspection robot that walks on four legs. According to the AWS Robotics Blog, ANYmal is designed to perform repetitive and hazardous inspection tasks and is a rugged, autonomous, highly mobile, ready-to-go inspection robot. Legs matter here. Industrial sites are full of stairs, grated walkways, pipes and uneven ground that wheeled machines struggle with. A legged robot can go where a human inspector would go.
The robot carries sensors that collect the kind of information a plant operator cares about. One industry write-up notes that ANYmal uses thermal cameras, gas sensors and acoustic detectors to spot faults before they cause costly production stoppages. The robot is only half of the value. The other half is the data it gathers and where that data goes next.
ANYbotics currently offers two main variants: ANYmal D for general industrial environments and ANYmal X, described as the first ATEX/IECEx Zone 1 certified legged inspection robot, built for explosive atmospheres.
Why a Robot Company Needs the Cloud
Selling one robot to one site is a hardware problem. Running dozens or hundreds of robots across continents is a software and infrastructure problem. A few challenges show up quickly:
Data volume. Every inspection round produces images, thermal readings, audio and telemetry that must be stored, organized and made available.
Mission management. Operators need to send new inspection missions to robots, wherever they are and have the robots report back.
Customer access. Customers want to pull inspection results into their own maintenance and asset-management systems, usually through APIs.
Global reach. Robots working in Texas, Norway and Malaysia should not all talk to a single server in one country.
This is the kind of problem cloud infrastructure is built for, which is where AWS comes in.
The AWS Building Blocks
The AWS Robotics Blog describes how ANYbotics put its solution together. The company is expanding its use of AWS offerings, including Amazon EC2 for customizable cloud capacity, Amazon EKS for provisioning, maintenance and scaling of customer-facing workloads and APIs and AWS Lambda for automated scheduling.
Here is a simple explanation:
Amazon EC2 provides virtual servers in the cloud. Having the option to rent computing capacity instead of purchasing and maintaining its own machines, ANYbotics can scale it as needed. Capacity can increase as more robots come online.
Amazon EKS is a managed Kubernetes service. Kubernetes is a popular way to run containerized software, or software packaged with everything it needs to run reliably from one computing environment to another. ANYbotics uses EKS for workloads and APIs its customers interact with. Because AWS handles much of the operational burden of running Kubernetes, ANYbotics’ engineers can spend more time on robot features and less on server upkeep.
AWS Lambda runs small pieces of code in response to events or schedules, without anyone managing a server. ANYbotics uses it for automated scheduling, a natural fit when robots must run inspection rounds at set times.
How the Data Flows
The architecture follows a simple idea. According to the AWS blog, ANYbotics developed its solution to collect data from ANYmal, store it in AWS and then make it accessible via API to its customers.
Think of it as a loop:
A robot walks its routes and gathers inspection data
That data is synchronized to the cloud
It is stored and processed on AWS
Customers access the results through APIs and software
New missions are sent back down to the robot.
ANYbotics has containers for data synchronization between ANYmal and AWS, for sending new missions to the robot and for other workloads. Using containers keeps these jobs modular. The component that syncs data can be updated without touching the one that dispatches missions.
Going Global With Low Latency
ANYmal robots don’t sit in one place. The AWS blog says they are deployed at industrial sites worldwide, and that ANYbotics can use the global footprint of AWS to bring its solution closer to the robots, reducing latency and improving performance for customers.
Latency is the delay between sending a command and seeing a result. For a robot navigating a facility or an operator watching live inspection data, a long round trip to a distant data center is a real nuisance. Running services in AWS regions near the customer's site keeps the experience responsive, and ANYbotics doesn't have to build its own data centers around the world to get there.
Robot-as-a-Service
The business model that comes out of this setup is just as interesting as the technology. The blog explains that, as a result, ANYbotics provides a versatile and scalable Robot-as-a-Service (RaaS) offering using AWS.
Robot-as-a-Service changes how industrial customers buy automation. Instead of a one-off hardware purchase followed by a long wait for software to catch up, customers get a continuing service: a robot, the cloud platform behind it, and the data and updates that come with it. The cloud backbone is what makes that model workable, because the value keeps flowing after the robot is delivered.
From Customer to Partner
The relationship goes beyond ANYbotics buying cloud services. In August 2024, the company announced that its robot was joining the AWS ecosystem. ANYbotics said it was launching its AI-driven ANYmal robot as an AWS Partner Solution and part of the AWS IoT Solutions hub.
The announcement explained the thinking behind it. By integrating with AWS IoT Hub, ANYbotics enhances data management, enabling improved safety, regulatory compliance, and operational optimization. It also made ANYmal easier to find and buy, since ANYmal is available on the AWS Marketplace as well as through the AWS IoT Solutions Library.
That matters to customers. Many large industrial companies already run on AWS and have existing procurement relationships with it. Having a robot available through those same channels lowers the barrier to trying one out. A company can bring an inspection robot into the environment it already uses, instead of treating it as a separate, isolated system.
Trade press coverage of the partnership echoed this. One outlet reported that ANYbotics said the integration with AWS IoT Hub provides the infrastructure needed to manage a global fleet of robots efficiently. A company executive was quoted saying that AWS infrastructure lets ANYbotics enhance and scale its robotic inspection solutions significantly.
What This Means for Industry
Putting the pieces together, the collaboration points to a few broader ideas.
Robots are becoming data sources. An inspection robot that walks a route and returns structured data is closer to a mobile sensor network than a standalone gadget. The real payoff comes when that data feeds predictive maintenance, helping teams catch a failing component before it halts production. ANYbotics has said it plans to further develop its predictive maintenance and worker safety tools by integrating ANYmal into digital operations projects and leveraging AWS expertise in cloud computing and robotics.
Cloud infrastructure lets small teams reach a worldwide market. A robotics startup can't easily build a global network of data centers. Renting that capability lets ANYbotics focus on what it does best, which is robot hardware, locomotion and inspection intelligence, while AWS handles the plumbing.
Safety is the point. Sending a robot into a hazardous area keeps people out of harm's way. Combine that with timely, well-organized data, and operators can make better decisions without anyone stepping into a risky zone.
Looking Ahead
The partnership is still developing. ANYbotics has said that in the coming months, AWS and ANYbotics will continue working on groups focused on developing new integrations and tools that help customers digitize their operations quickly and effectively. The company has also grown considerably. A recent funding announcement put its total financing at more than 127 million euros, to drive global expansion and bring the new ANYmal X model to market. AWS is listed among the organizations it works with, alongside energy and industrial names such as Equinor, ENI, Petrobras and Siemens Energy.
Conclusion
ANYbotics shows how a modern robotics company can pair physical machines with cloud software. ANYmal handles the dangerous, repetitive work on site. AWS handles the scale: running containerized services on EKS, flexible compute on EC2, scheduling through Lambda, global reach for low latency, and integration with IoT and Marketplace channels customers already know.
The result is a Robot-as-a-Service model that treats an inspection robot as one part of a larger, connected system. As industries push for safer operations and smarter maintenance, expect more robotics companies to follow the same path of strong hardware paired with a strong cloud backbone.