ANYbotics launches Shift to streamline robot fleet operations, scale inspections
ANYbotics designed Shift to help maintenance teams run industrial inspections, detect failing equipment, and turn data into work orders. The post ANYbotics launches Shift to streamline robot fleet operations, scale inspections appeared first on The Robot Report.
Overview
The ANYmal quadruped now works with ANYbotics Shift for autonomous inspections. Source: ANYbotics
Undetected failures cost the world’s 500 largest companies an estimated $1.4 trillion each year in downtime, with a single hour of outage averaging $250,000, according to ANYbotics AG. The company today launched ANYbotics Shift, a platform intended to simplify asset health assessments and enable preventive maintenance.
“The new platform empowers businesses to harness the full potential of autonomous inspection by planning and running multi-robot missions, while organizing captured field data directly around existing asset management infrastructure,” explained ANYbotics.
“Robotic inspection delivers the most value when field data flows directly into maintenance action,” stated Péter Fankhauser, co-founder and CEO of ANYbotics. “Shift makes that seamless. It unifies plant mapping, robot fleet coordination, inspection AI analytics, and systems integrations into one platform. At its core, Shift AI powers the intelligence that transforms field findings into work orders, saving millions in avoiding unplanned downtime.”
Founded in 2016, ANYbotics said its ANYmal quadruped robots are suitable for tasks including routine inspections and real-time data collection, addressing labor shortages and improving worker safety. The Zurich-based company serves the global energy, power, metals, mining, and chemicals industries.
Shift includes four modules
ANYbotics said its cloud-based platform delivers visibility, action, and measurable impact through four interconnected modules:
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- Shift Fleet unifies scheduling, monitoring, and control for an entire fleet of inspection robots. A distributed control system (DCS) can trigger missions directly. The system ensures that critical assets are inspected repeatedly and consistently, freeing reliability engineers to review findings and prioritize repairs.
- Shift Insight combines thermal, acoustic, visual, and gas readings with operating conditions such as motor speed, load, and ambient temperature. A reading only counts as an anomaly when the context says it should, reporting overheating, partial discharge, leaks, and misalignments while they are still relatively harmless, said ANYbotics.
- Shift Connect turns confirmed anomalies directly into work orders inside operations software. Through productized connectors and standard REST APIs, Connect integrates across five categories:
- Distributed control systems (DCS) such as Yokogawa
- Computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS)
- Enterprise resource planning (ERP) tools like SAP and IBM Maximo
- Asset performance management (APM) platforms such as GE Vernova APM
- Digital twin or contextualization layers like Cognite and Oracle
This bi-directional integration allows process thresholds to automatically trigger new robot inspection rounds, while an integrated notification center delivers real-time alerts through tools such as email and Microsoft Teams. ANYbotics plans to add SMS and WhatsApp support.
- Shift Maps provides a live digital twin of a manufacturing plant. It maps inspection targets into APM and enterprise asset management (EAM) infrastructures. Structures are imported by asset ID, so every reading is tied to the right piece of equipment.
ANYbotics said the transition from its Data Navigator asset management product to Shift will be automatic with an upcoming update. Shift AI learns from every connected module, which operates from the same plant model.
Shift includes modules for fleet management, maps and deployments, workflow integration, and asset intelligence. Source: ANYbotics
ANYbotics answers questions about Shift
Jacob Euler-Rolle, head of product management and workflow integration at ANYbotics, replied to the following questions from The Robot Report:
How much integration work with enterprise systems is required for a first-time customer?
Euler-Rolle: Very little. Shift is designed to work with the systems your plant already runs, so a first-time deployment requires no enterprise integration at all, it operates the fleet and delivers findings independently right out of the box.
When users are ready to connect their ANYmal or ANYmals to their software stack, we offer pre-built integrations through our partnerships with SAP, GE Vernova, Siemens Energy, Cognite, SLB, and Yokogawa.
For any other system, the Shift REST API (documented with OpenAPI) links its data and findings to their CMMS or APM and enables their existing platforms to trigger inspections. Our team can also build custom connectors during onboarding, if required.
So for users, the effort is very minimal and largely limited to granting network access, securing approvals, and mapping asset IDs to align with their plant’s existing asset hierarchy.
The Shift API connects the ANYbot fleet to digital twins, asset performance management platforms, enterprise software, and facility systems. Source: ANYbotics
How much training do customers need?
Euler-Rolle: Training takes just a few days rather than weeks, and users require no prior robotics expertise. The entire onboarding process is organized by job role through our ANYbotics Academy, which has already trained over 1,000 users.
Because Shift uses role-based access, each user sees an interface tailored to their specific responsibilities. So, whether they are operators scheduling and monitoring the fleet, reliability engineers reviewing inspection findings, or maintenance teams receiving work orders directly within their existing systems, the UI is tailored to their role. That role-based access means the interface adapts to each persona, so nobody gets lost in functions they don’t need or sees data they shouldn’t.
Details
What other robots could Shift work with?
Euler-Rolle: Today, Shift supports landing or incoming inspection data from third-party robots and sensors. Full fleet management for non-ANYmal hardware will start to roll out next year, as Shift advances towards being a single operations hub for mixed-robot fleets.
Will Shift enable interoperability among robots from different vendors and comply with VDA 5050 or U.S. standards?
Euler-Rolle: Interoperability sits at the heart of our Shift roadmap. While standards like VDA 5050 were designed for AGVs and AMRs navigating fixed nodes in intralogistics, inspection robots in process facilities operate differently. Their core focus is capturing asset inspection data rather than executing transport orders.
The Shift API delivers an interoperability layer centered directly on inspection tasks and asset management, while integrating established fleet standards wherever they’re relevant. Because no unified inspection-robot standard currently exists in either the U.S. or Europe, we plan to help shape one.
Shift unifies management of autonomous inspection fleets, keeping people out of harm’s way. Source: ANYbotics
What provisions have you made for cybersecurity?
Euler-Rolle: Data security is fundamental to physical AI. Industrial users require a verified, secure end-to-end data flow before deploying autonomous systems. ANYbotics enforces strict digital boundaries to maintain the integrity of ANYmal’s decision-making, prevent external manipulation, and ensure safe deployment in sensitive industrial environments.
Shift operates under ISO 27001 standards and provides end-to-end encryption for data in transit and at rest, strict tenant isolation, and detailed role-based access control to protect information and ensure secure operations.
Hosted in the ANYbotics Cloud, Shift supports regional data residency to keep information within specified geographic areas and offers an on-premises deployment option for organizations with strict local regulatory requirements.
Is Shift available immediately in North America and Europe? What about Asia?
Euler-Rolle: Shift will be available globally with the 1.0 release, including North America, Europe, Asia, and all regions where we currently operate.
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Shift is already deployed across more than 200 robot deployments and runs hundreds of thousands of inspections every month, noted ANYbotics.
“Shift makes it easy for SAP to integrate robot inspections into business processes,” said Adelya Fatykhova, global lead architect for embodied AI agents, physical AI, and robotics at SAP. “Physical AI on SAP Business AI Platform translates a business need into a Shift mission, with results stored back in SAP for follow-ups like maintenance order creation. Robot inspection missions through Shift enhance SAP’s Autonomous Supply Chain for asset and field service with robot execution.”
At Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD), the platform saved more than $3.5 million in its first months of operation on critical substation assets. It flagged overheating conductors, partial discharge, and gas leaks that manual rounds had missed, ANYbotics said.
“ANYbotics Shift’s API gives our APM platform consistent, valuable equipment-level inspection data from across the plant floor,” said Neha Joshi, product leader at GE Vernova APM.
“Combining field insights with our analytics creates a more complete picture of asset health, helping teams identify, validate, and address issues more effectively,” she added. “When our models flag a potential issue, we can use the same API to send robots to verify it and capture additional context.”
At a Vigier Cement plant running 24/7, Shift executed more than 33,000 autonomous inspections in 16 months, said ANYbotics. The platform structured every reading against the plant’s asset hierarchy so the maintenance team could compare condition trends over time and prioritize repairs.
The post ANYbotics launches Shift to streamline robot fleet operations, scale inspections appeared first on The Robot Report.
Source
Originally published at www.therobotreport.com.