Locomotion

Quadruped

A quadruped is a four-legged robot, a form factor that balances stability, agility, and mechanical simplicity relative to bipeds, with prominent examples including Boston Dynamics Spot, ANYbotics ANYmal, and the Unitree and MIT Mini Cheetah lines. Quadrupeds became the proving ground for learned locomotion, where reinforcement learning policies trained in simulation now routinely outperform hand-designed controllers on rough terrain.

Why it matters for physical AI

Quadrupeds delivered the first commercially deployed learned locomotion at scale, and lessons from their sim-to-real pipelines now inform humanoid and mobile manipulation training.