ANYmal Review (5★)

Editorial

ANYmal is the adult in the quadruped room when the environment can explode. Spot owns general industrial inspection mindshare; ANYmal X owns the hazardous-zone argument with certification-led selling. Speed is deliberately conservative — plants pay for not falling into a sump, not for TikTok gait tricks. If your KPI is “replace a human walking a sour-gas unit at 2 a.m.,” this is the shortlist with Spot, not Unitree.

Pros

• ANYmal X explosion-proof variants target ATEX zones Spot cannot legally enter without special casing
• 4h inspection missions with LiDAR + thermal + gas payloads match oil/gas/chemical route sheets
• Proven stair and grating traversal in live plants — not just warehouse concrete
• Autonomous docking and fleet scheduling designed around continuous industrial inspection SLAs

Cons

• Enterprise pricing and long sales cycles lock out smaller facilities
• ~1.0 m/s cruise is slower than Go2 sprint demos — optimized for caution, not virality
• 10kg payload still constrains exotic NDT tools without custom integration
• Swiss support footprint is thinner than Boston Dynamics’ global channel in some regions