Towards Real-World Deployment of Legged Robots

Legged robots have unique potential advantages over wheeled and tracked systems in regard to the traversal of rough and unstructured terrain as well as rapid movement among crowds, and this has led to a growing interest and body of research in legged systems. However, there are very few actual real-world deployments of legged robots, and, so far, there has been no significant uptake of legged robots in domains such as agriculture, mining, manufacturing, environmental monitoring, social navigation and others. This special issue will address the missing ingredients that are holding back widespread real-world deployment of legged robots.

Legged robots have long been proposed as the solution for traversing complex environments and difficult terrain. However, in spite of significant advances in recent years, current systems are generally far from adequate for actual field deployments. Smaller legged robots are severely limited in payload and effective range; larger outdoor legged robots are often too inefficient and slow for field use, and unable to navigate really challenging terrain.

Despite growing research interest in legged locomotion, a number of ”missing ingredients” hold legged robots back from wide-spread real-world deployment. Some of the issues faced by researchers include the performance limitations of current legged robots (when compared to biological systems), the inherent lower efficiency of legged versus wheeled locomotion, design constraints related to available materials and actuators, substantial power requirements, and lack of spatial reasoning in constrained and dynamic environments; there are, however, many other challenges to be addressed.

The goal of this special issue is to identify the fundamental research challenges whose solution is required to bring legged robots to real-world applications. This will address challenges in legged robot design, control, planning, perception, and systems integration.

This research topic calls for contributions in the area of legged robot advancement with a clear application on real-world deployments and demonstrations. Subject areas include, but are not limited to:

● Design and Control
 ○ mechatronic and actuator design
 ○ optimization-based co-design
 ○ model predictive and optimization-based control
 ○ whole-body control
 ○ legged manipulation
 ○ reinforcement learning for locomotion
 ○ power efficiency

● Motion Planning, Perception, and Mapping
 ○ optimization-based and perceptive motion planning
 ○ sensor fusion under uncertainty
 ○ localization and mapping in static or dynamic environments
 ○ foot placement generation in rough terrain
 ○ feature extraction and semantic scene understanding
 ○ trajectory generation

● Real-World Applications
 ○ disaster response
 ○ industrial inspection
 ○ payload delivery
 ○ unstructured environment monitoring
 ○ social navigation
 ○ planetary science

Topic Editor Luis Sentis is a Founder of Apptronik. All other Topic Editors declare no competing interests with regard to the Research Topic subject.