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Every project supported by Gebert Rüf Stiftung is made accessible with a web presentation that informs about the core data of the project. With this public presentation, the foundation publishes the funding results achieved and contributes to the communication of science to society.

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ANYmal – ein Roboterhund für unwegsames Gelände

Editorial

Für den Inhalt der Angaben zeichnet die Projektleitung verantwortlich.

Cooperation

This project funded by Gebert Rüf Stiftung is additionally supported by the following project partners: Robotic Systems Lab ETH Zurich; Wyss Zurich; NCCR Robotics; Horizon 2020; ECHORD++ Booster; ESA Business Incubation Center; Gebert Rüf Design+

Project data

  • Project no: GRS-008/16 
  • Amount of funding: CHF 300'000 
  • Approved: 06.07.2016 
  • Duration: 10.2016 - 09.2018 
  • Area of activity:  Pilotprojekte, 1998 - 2018

Project management

Project description

The aim of the project was to develop a robust quadruped robot which can autonomous walk and overcome obstacles such as steps, stairs or stones. This highly mobile walking machine can be used for different applications, e.g. search & rescue, industrial inspection, or entertainment. Within this project, the design of an existing prototype has been revised to create an affordable walking robot for the market. With the support of GRS, we an initial contribution, which advances legged systems worldwide, has been made.

What is special about the project?

Research in legged robotics has advanced considerably over recent years. High computation power with low energy consumption, powerful actuators, better sensors and batteries enable building autonomous legged machines. However, due to the high complexity of these machines, commercial legged robots are not yet available on the market and thus every research group has to start from scratch to build such a system.

This project addressed this issue by building state-of-the-art robust quadruped robots and make them commercially available to research groups. The project profited from seven years of experience in building legged robots at ETH Zurich. To this date, three other universities have already received a robot developed within this project and were able to conduct hardware experiments and publish scientific results. With the support of GRS, we expect that legged robots are used in various applications in the near future.

Status/Results

During this project, we developed and built a new quadruped robot, ANYmal 2.0. The new robot is equipped with a new generation of compliant actuators, ANYdrive 2.0, which are more robust regarding ingress protection. The software and user documentation reached the level necessary to distribute the robot to other research partners. Five robots have been built and distributed and several research groups joined the ANYmal research programme, an initiative that targets to spread the technology to advanced legged robotics.

The spin-off company ANYbotics, which was founded during this project, will continue to improve the outcomes of this project and will provide support to the research partners with the goal to develop the market for legged robots. In first pilot projects with different industrial companies, ANYbotics is investigating the use of such machine for dirty and dangerous works on offshore platforms, in forests or mines.

Publications

Hutter, M., Gehring, C., Lauber, A., Gunther, F., Bellicoso, C. D., Tsounis, V., … Meyer, K. (2017). ANYmal - toward legged robots for harsh environments. Advanced Robotics, 31(17), 918–931.
P. Fankhauser and M. Hutter. ANYmal: A Unique Quadruped Robot Conquering Harsh Environments. Research Features, (126):54–57, 2018.

Media

Links

Persons involved in the project

Marco Hutter, Project coordinator
Hanspeter Fässler, Business development
Christian Gehring, Software development
Peter Fankhauser, Software development
Remo Diethelm, Software development
Samuel Bachmann, Software development
Andreas Lauber, Hardware development
Fabian Günther, Hardware development

Last update to this project presentation  28.06.2023