Locomotion

Legged Robot

A legged robot is a mobile robot that locomotes using articulated limbs rather than wheels or tracks, spanning bipeds, quadrupeds such as ANYmal and Boston Dynamics' Spot, and humanoids. Legs enable traversal of stairs, rubble, and discontinuous terrain inaccessible to wheels, at the cost of high-dimensional, contact-rich control. Modern controllers are commonly trained with reinforcement learning in simulation and transferred to hardware.

Why it matters for physical AI

Legged platforms proved that sim-to-real reinforcement learning can produce robust real-world behavior at scale, and they extend robot deployment into human-built and outdoor spaces designed for legs, not wheels.