As nimble as a dog, the robot climbs up and down stairs, runs across corridors and platforms, past huge pipelines, conduit systems, turbines and equipment inside a hydroelectric power plant in the Austrian Alps. With its elongated yellow body on slender black legs, the inspection robot really does look like a dog on watchful patrol of its territory. The camera system in the robot's head scans the environment, continuously looking for possible malfunctions, objects that do not belong there, unusual processes, and checks temperature data and control gauges.

The walking robot was built by the company Boston Dynamics. The hardware is the shell, the inner workings were designed by the Darmstadt start-up Energy Robotics. The computer science graduates of the Technical University and the US robotics company have been working together since 2021. “We develop the software for the inspection robots”, explains Energy Robotics CEO Marc Dassler. Since 2019, the TU spin-off offers the first commercially available software platform that combines a hardware-independent robot operating system with cloud-based fleet management and AI-driven data analysis for industrial applications.

A successful company history: Supported since 2017 by the TU Innovation and Start-up Centre HIGHEST, Energy Robotics was named Start-up of the Year by “Frankfurt Forward” in November 2021. “Frankfurt Forward” brings together founders and established companies under the umbrella of the Frankfurt Economic Development GmbH. In early 2021, Earlybird Venture Capital and other investors had already invested around two million euros in the Darmstadt-based developers, and the search for further investors is currently underway. “We have grown strongly since then”, says Marc Dassler. In just three years, the number of employees at the TU spin-off has risen to 28. Energy Robotics' software solutions are now in use in 13 countries on four continents.

The company is based at Hub31, in Hilpertstrasse in Darmstadt. “The new laboratory and robot testing facility are located there”, reports TU professor Oskar von Stryk. A small part of the team is working and developing locally, but most of the staff are spread across Germany and Europe, says CEO Dassler.

The start-up was created at the Department of Computer Science at the TU Darmstadt. The members of the founding team have known each other for more than ten years. “We all have our roots in university robot football”, recounts Stefan Kohlbrecher. He and Dorian Scholz were initially undergraduate students and later doctoral students of Professor von Stryk. They were joined by the Mexican Alberto Romay when international university teams came together at the RoboCup, the Robot Football World Championship in Graz 2009, and the TU Darmstadt dominated the scene. “I absolutely have to go there”, Romay thought and moved from Mexico City to Darmstadt with a doctoral scholarship.

Since then, Energy Robotics has continuously developed its cross-hardware software solutions. The robots of their company partners “Ex-Robotics” and Boston Dynamics – an application for other robot types and also drones is currently in the works – navigate autonomously thanks to the software from Darmstadt. Laser scanners are used to create maps of the facilities to be monitored. The robots learn. Once remotely sent on their surveillance course, they can then negotiate it on their own.