Where it works
Power plants, substations, offshore platforms and industrial facilities, walking fixed inspection routes and reading instruments in places built for human legs rather than wheels.
Industrial inspection is one of the few jobs where legs pay for themselves. A substation or process plant is full of stairs, grating, cable trays and raised thresholds that were designed around a walking technician, and retrofitting them for wheeled robots costs more than the robots. A quadruped inherits that geometry for free, and it can carry the same thermal and acoustic sensors a human inspector would bring on a round.
Sold and supported through industrial contracts; no public list price.
What it means to own one
Inspection robots earn against a different logic than cleaning robots: the value is avoided downtime and safer access, not hours of labour replaced. That makes contracts stickier and rates harder to compare.
Inspection is priced against risk, not against wages. The customer is not buying back an hour of labour; it is buying earlier detection of a failing bearing or a hot joint, and the value of that scales with what the plant loses per hour of unplanned shutdown. Contracts therefore look more like maintenance agreements than rentals, and the rates are negotiated case by case, which is why no public price exists to calculate from.