27 Years of Climbing and Walking Robots – Are We There?

In recent years, we have seen tremendous progress in the field of legged robotics and the application of quadrupedal systems in real-world scenarios. Besides the massive improvement of the hardware systems to rugged and certified products by a number of companies, recent developments in perception, navigation planning, and reinforcement learning for locomotion control have unleashed a new level of robot mobility and autonomy to operate in challenging terrain. In this presentation, I will talk about our work on control and autonomy for legged robots and other mobile machines. I will give insights into the underlying methodologies, present some of the most interesting findings, and talk about real-world deployments in the wild. With thousands of (commercial) legged robots in the field and tremendous progress in the technology of the last decade, what are the remaining research questions for our community?