As much as we like writing about quadrupedal robots, it’s always been a little bit tricky to see how they might be commercially useful in the near term outside of specialized circumstances like disaster response. We’ve seen some hints of what might be possible from Boston Dynamics, which has demonstrated construction inspection with SpotMini, but that’s not necessarily a situation where a robot is significantly better than a human.

In September, ANYbotics brought one of their industrial quadrupeds, ANYmal, to an offshore power distribution platform in the North Sea. It’s very remote, and nothing much happens there, but it still requires a human or two to wander around checking up on stuff, a job that nobody wants.