Advances, challenges, and opportunities for legged robots
arXiv:2607.28952v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Humanoid and quadrupedal robots have the potential to revolutionize the way we work, interact, and coexist with intelligent machines. To understand their effects on society and how they can enable scientific discovery, we assess the current capabilities of these systems along hardware, locomotion, autonomy, data, and applications. We identify recent advances and key open challenges that must be overcome to enable widespread adoption and new use cases for legged robots. Last, we provide an outlook on the future of legged robots, exploring their ethical considerations, economic potential, policy implications, and broader societal effects.
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[Submitted on 31 Jul 2026]
Title:Advances, challenges, and opportunities for legged robots
View a PDF of the paper titled Advances, challenges, and opportunities for legged robots, by Jonas Frey and Mat\'ias Mattamala and Hae-Won Park and Mayank Mittal and Georg Martius and Maike Osborne and Robert Sparrow and Marco Hutter
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Abstract:Humanoid and quadrupedal robots have the potential to revolutionize the way we work, interact, and coexist with intelligent machines. To understand their effects on society and how they can enable scientific discovery, we assess the current capabilities of these systems along hardware, locomotion, autonomy, data, and applications. We identify recent advances and key open challenges that must be overcome to enable widespread adoption and new use cases for legged robots. Last, we provide an outlook on the future of legged robots, exploring their ethical considerations, economic potential, policy implications, and broader societal effects.
Comments: Accepted for publication in Science Robotics. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of the AAAS for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Science Robotics on July 29, 2026, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/scirobotics.aee0787
Subjects:
Robotics (cs.RO)
ACM classes: I.2.9
Cite as: arXiv:2607.28952 [cs.RO]
(or arXiv:2607.28952v1 [cs.RO] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.28952
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Journal reference: Science Robotics, Vol. 11, Issue 116 (2026)
Related DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1126/scirobotics.aee0787
DOI(s) linking to related resources
Submission history
From: Jonas Frey [view email] [v1] Fri, 31 Jul 2026 02:16:54 UTC (4,305 KB)
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