Three days at Equinor’s K-Lab Test Center in Kårstø on 8-10 September brought asset owners, service providers and technology suppliers together to deploy and showcase robots in a real industrial environment, compare approaches and discuss directly what operators need. The 2026 European Robotic Fitness Challenge showed how much the technology has progressed, and how valuable it is to bring the people developing solutions together with the people who ultimately have to use, approve and integrate them.
A Robotic Fitness Challenge is deliberately different from a conference or exhibition. Technologies are brought onto a working industrial site and put through agreed tasks, with feedback from end user observers. That creates conversations that are difficult to reproduce in a meeting room: What works in practice? What still needs to improve? What information does an operator actually need? And what would it take to use a solution in day-to-day operations?
This year brought together both long-standing SPRINT Associate Participants and new companies and technologies. Sevnce Robotics and bluZenit brought another quadruped into the Challenge, while CleverHive brought experience from a very different environment: lunar missions. A simple question from CleverHive: “ What do operators actually want to see on a dashboard?”,quickly developed into a wider discussion between technology developers and end users.
There was plenty to see in the field. Skeye and Aker Solutions operated drones at the site, with Skeye demonstrating how an operator round at Kårstø could be executed autonomously, while monitored by the command center in Rotterdam. The resulting inspection data was subsequently turned into information an inspector could work with, with contributions from Falcker and Korial. FlytBase contributed to the discussions around operating drones at scale.
In ground robotics, Aker Solutions with the Taurob robot and ANYbotics with their ANYmal D robot demonstrated perfect autonomous operator rounds, these robotic platforms have continued to develop since the first Robotic Fitness Challenge in 2022.
The Challenge also went beyond inspection. Robotics for automated maintenance work, including welding and spraying, formed part of the program. We heard about the experience and achievements of Effee, executing a remote welding job in Australia, and saw a series of automated welding and repair solutions from WSI and Remotion. Some of these technologies have already been used in the field for many years, creating an important discussion about how industry can make wider use of solutions that have already demonstrated their value.
An essential part of the Robotic Fitness Challenge is the feedback. Asset owners spent three days watching, questioning and discussing the technologies with the teams behind them. The questions were practical and constructive, covering the realities of working on industrial sites, from permits and communications to data and operational requirements. For technology suppliers, that direct access to end-user experience is valuable; for asset owners, the Challenge provides an efficient way to see different technologies and approaches side by side and learn from the experiences of others.
None of this would have been possible without the enormous effort of the Equinor team. We came away with great admiration for the professionalism, preparation and commitment behind hosting a robotics event on a live industrial site. A huge thank you to everyone at Equinor who worked behind the scenes and throughout the Challenge to make the three days possible.
And the conversations do not stop when the robots leave the site. What we learned at Kårstø feeds directly into the next discussions within the SPRINT Robotics community.
SPRINT Robotics facilitates these discussions by bringing together asset owners, service providers, technology suppliers, regulators and academia. Want to take part? Join SPRINT Robotics or meet the community at one of our upcoming summits in Houston, Rio de Janeiro or Zürich, or at the 2027 SPRINT Robotics World Conference in Singapore.
