ANYbotics is a Swiss robotics company that develops autonomous, four-legged robots designed for industrial inspections. Their flagship product, the ANYmal robot, navigates complex, hazardous, and multi-floor environments to perform routine monitoring, detect gas leaks, and collect thermal and acoustic data, keeping human workers out of dangerous areas.
- Cut incident-to-data access from days to the moment of customer notification, so engineers can act immediately.
- Eliminated the old workflow's three biggest data failures (partial logs, wrong time windows, and on-robot retention cleanup) by pulling complete, time-accurate data directly from the robot.
- Consolidated six tools into one environment for fetching, visualizing, and analyzing robot data.
- Fully displaced ANYbotics' internal bag-retrieval tool: 100% of validation testing now runs through Foxglove.
Overview
ANYbotics builds autonomous robotic inspection systems for the most demanding industrial environments in the world. Its four-legged ANYmal robots conduct routine inspections at oil and gas facilities, power generation sites, chemical plants, mines, and heavy manufacturing operations. Customers include Equinor, Shell, BASF, Petronas, Siemens Energy, and BP.
In these environments, trust is the bar. Operators are handing over inspection rounds that protect worker safety, asset integrity, and uptime. ANYbotics has built a support model around that responsibility, helping customers understand what happened in the field and resolve issues quickly when something does not go as planned. As deployments scaled across more sites, fleets, and operator profiles, fast access to complete robot data became essential to making that model even more responsive and repeatable.
Foxglove helps ANYbotics strengthen that support loop by giving teams direct, secure access to data from deployed robots in a single environment for inspection, sharing, and analysis.
“Scaling an autonomous robotic workforce demands both uncompromising quality and cost-efficiency. While standard telemetry offers a reliable macro-level view of fleet health, Foxglove enables our engineers to pinpoint the root causes of complex edge cases, drastically accelerating time-to-resolution and driving down support and maintenance costs.” Martin Bühlmann, Head of Cost & Quality, ANYbotics
A Foxglove layout showing ANYmal sensor, autonomy, and telemetry streams during an inspection mission.
The Challenge: Scaling data access for a growing global robot fleet
ANYbotics’ robots operate at customer sites that span continents, fleet sizes, and skill levels. When something unexpected happens in the field, engineering needs to understand exactly what the robot saw, decided, and did, often without being able to set foot on the site. Every hour spent waiting for data is an hour the customer is waiting for an answer.
Before Foxglove, the workflow stood in the way. Consider a representative incident: an ANYmal robot on a routine inspection mission encountered a misplaced box that blocked the only path back to its docking station. The robot got stuck and ran out of battery. The customer retrieved the machine, connected a laptop, copied the logs, and uploaded them to a shared drive. Only then could ANYbotics support begin analyzing the issue using a patchwork of internal and legacy tools.
Support discovered the wrong time window had been captured, and the entire process had to be repeated. Days passed before any engineer started analyzing the root cause. And the case was hardly unique: partial logs, wrong time windows, and logs already cleaned up by on-robot retention were common failure modes that forced the team to go back to the customer and reset the process again and again.
Inside the company, the need for a more scalable data workflow was becoming just as clear. Developers and validation teams needed a faster way to inspect and work with robot data across testing and field support scenarios. ANYbotics had built internal tools and command-line workflows that served the team well at an earlier stage, but as fleet size grew and validation demands increased, the process required too much manual coordination. Engineers often relied on familiar manual paths when speed mattered, adding extra steps to validation cycles and making it harder to standardize analysis across teams.
The Solution: One platform for every robot, every incident, every team
Today, when a customer notifies ANYbotics of an incident, support pulls the relevant log files directly from the robot through Foxglove, with no customer-side extraction or upload required. Engineers gain access to complete, time-accurate data at the moment of notification, and they work from a single environment to inspect what happened.
The downstream effect on ANYbotics’ support model is significant. The team operates a tiered response: Tier 1 brings the robot back to a safe state, Tier 2 determines what kind of incident occurred, and engineering investigates the logs to understand root cause. Foxglove compresses every step that touches data. Tier 2 can triage faster because the right data is already available. Engineering can begin analysis immediately rather than waiting on file transfers. The path from customer issue to informed response becomes shorter and more repeatable.
“Once our data was in Foxglove, engineers could easily identify the root cause. The Foxglove agent and automation completely transformed our workflow, reducing a multi-step data extraction process that used to take hours or days down to a single click that takes minutes.” Aaron Roller, Head of Software Infrastructure & Reliability, ANYbotics
Verification and Testing engineers depend on the same Foxglove workflows to validate behavior before changes ship to deployed robots, so the robots that reach the field are more trustworthy by design. Returning to the stuck-robot incident, that same scenario now runs end to end in hours rather than days, with ANYbotics pulling complete data directly from the machine the moment the customer flags the issue.
Side-by-side comparison of the old (manual, customer-mediated) and new (Foxglove-direct) workflows.
ANYbotics’ Build-versus-buy decision
ANYbotics faced a familiar build-versus-buy decision: continue investing engineering time into homegrown infrastructure for a non-core capability, or adopt a purpose-built platform designed for robotics data workflows.
The choice was about focus. Keep ANYbotics’ engineering resources on the core strength and customer impact of its autonomous inspection systems, and let Foxglove own the data layer. In evaluation, Foxglove stood out because it could retrieve bag files from robots quickly and easily, and because its architecture, including support for edge servers, was credible for the kind of large-enterprise deployments ANYbotics is scaling into.
Looking ahead: Trust at scale
ANYbotics is building toward a future where every hazardous, dirty, or repetitive industrial inspection is performed by an autonomous legged robot. That mission only succeeds if customers trust those robots, and trust the team standing behind them. Every new site, every new operator, and every new deployment model raises the bar on how quickly ANYbotics can turn robot data into understanding.
Foxglove enables ANYbotics to meet that bar. As the company scales across more customers, more sites, and more demanding deployment models, including its expansion into Ex-certified hazardous-zone inspection with ANYmal X, Foxglove provides the visualization, synchronization, collaboration, and security capabilities the team needs to keep its reliability, uptime, and safety commitments visible and verifiable to the operators who depend on them.
