In my latest at Forbes, I look at a Swiss robot, ANYmal, that is reminiscent of Boston Dynamics’ Spot: a quadruped dog-like robot.
From the post:
While there’s been a huge amount of innovation in humanoid robots from the likes of Figure, Apptronik, Sanctuary AI, and the Tesla Optimus bot, there’s still room for other form factors. Boston Dynamics has Spot, a quadrupedal sensing and inspection robot, for instance. ETH, the Swiss institute of technology in Zurich, has been working on ANYmal for some time. And it just got smarter and more capable: no longer just hiking the mountainous trails of Switzerland, ANYmal is now doing parkour.
“[ANYmal] is proving rather adept at parkour, a sport based on using athletic manoeuvres to smoothly negotiate obstacles in an urban environment,” says ETH. “ANYmal is also proficient at dealing with the tricky terrain commonly found on building sites or in disaster areas.”