An inspection robot that stops at a door is not much use on a plant floor. On September 24, 2026, ANYbotics said its four-legged ANYmal could now get past that obstacle. The Swiss company worked with door and access specialist dormakaba and credential maker LEGIC Identsystems AG, so the robot can walk through a facility the way a badged employee would: through the door, not around it.
The problem is bigger than it sounds. Jacob Euler-Rolle of ANYbotics’ product management team told The Robot Report that “Fire doors compartmentalize almost every process facility to isolate hazards, placing 30% to 50% of critical equipment behind restricted barriers.” In other words, a robot that can’t get through those barriers can’t inspect a large share of the equipment it was bought to check.
Two ways through
The solution splits doors into two cases:
- Unlocked doors (commercially available). A radar sensor detects ANYmal as it approaches and triggers a retrofitted dormakaba ED 100 or ED 250 swing door operator, which opens and closes the door automatically. No structural changes to the doors are needed, and the setup meets indoor, outdoor and fire-rated specifications.
- Access-controlled doors (coming later in 2026). Here ANYmal carries a LEGIC security payload that works as an electronic access pass, a trusted digital identity for the machine. The robot requests entry from dormakaba’s exos access management system, which grants or refuses it based on predefined permissions, the same way it would for a human cardholder.
The second case is the more interesting one. It doesn’t make the robot an exception to site security. It puts the robot inside the existing rules. That also covers the obvious worry about people slipping in behind a robot. According to Euler-Rolle, “someone tailgating a robot creates the same security event as someone tailgating a human, triggering the site’s standard countermeasures.”
Tested at a power plant
The system has already run under real conditions. GE Vernova tested it at its Whitegate power plant in County Cork, Ireland. Over several weeks of continuous testing, ANYmal repeatedly requested access, passed through controlled doors and finished its inspection routes without manual intervention. “The door passage solution allows ANYmal to move seamlessly between plant zones without compromising safety or security rules,” said Brian Carroll, a maintenance engineer at GE Vernova Whitegate.
ANYbotics co-founder and CEO Péter Fankhauser summed it up more simply: “With dormakaba and LEGIC, ANYmal can move through doors like any authorised colleague.” For LEGIC, general manager Mehdi Elhaoussine called it “a major step into physical AI”, extending the company’s credential technology from people and objects to machines.
What comes next
The access-control add-on will be offered for both current ANYmal deployments and future ANYmal hardware later in 2026. The partners are also looking at elevators, gates and turnstiles, which are the other barriers between a robot and a full site map. The timing fits the market: The Robot Report puts the growth of the inspection robotics sector at over 20% a year.
ANYbotics was spun out of ETH Zurich in 2016. It has about 200 employees, offices in Zurich, Barcelona and San Francisco, and more than $150 million in funding to date.
