AUTONOMOUS SYSTEMS
Robotics & Autonomous Systems
Legged robots, bionic flight and the machine intelligence that lets machines work in places built for people.
Between Zurich's robotics laboratories and the automation halls of southern Germany, the Alpine region has become one of the world's quiet centres of machine autonomy. Robots that walk on four legs, drones that flock like birds and factory systems that adapt on the fly are all being developed within a few hundred kilometres of each other.
What makes this region distinctive is the pairing of deep research institutions — ETH Zurich's robotics groups among the most cited in Europe — with a dense, export-oriented industrial base that needs automation for precision manufacturing, energy infrastructure and logistics. Spin-off companies carry research out of the laboratory and into refineries, railway tunnels and power stations.
In this topic the Atlas follows the machines and the ideas behind them: how legged locomotion works, what bionics contributes to engineering, and how autonomous inspection is changing hazardous industries.
Founded in 2016 as a spin-off of ETH Zurich's Robotic Systems Lab, ANYbotics builds the ANYmal quadruped — an autonomous inspection robot that walks through industrial facilities and, in its ANYmal X variant, works in explosive atmospheres.
A family-owned German automation company founded in 1925, Festo runs the Bionic Learning Network, whose flying and hopping robot animals — from SmartBird to the BionicKangaroo — have become icons of biomimetic engineering.