Locomotion

Agile Locomotion

Agile locomotion is legged robot movement that approaches the dynamism of animals: running, jumping, vaulting obstacles, rapid direction changes, and recovery from large disturbances. It requires exploiting rather than avoiding the robot's full dynamics, operating near actuator torque and speed limits with flight phases and impacts. Landmark demonstrations include MIT Cheetah's bounding and backflips, Boston Dynamics Atlas parkour, and reinforcement-learned parkour policies on quadrupeds such as ANYmal.

Why it matters for physical AI

Agility is where learned controllers have most clearly surpassed hand-designed ones, with sim-trained policies transferring dynamic skills that model-based methods struggled to produce, validating the simulation-to-reality pipeline at the edge of hardware limits.