The LittleDog robot

LittleDog is a small four-legged robot designed for research on legged locomotion. The LittleDog platform was designed by Boston Dynamics with funding from DARPA to enable rapid advances in the state of the art of rough-terrain locomotion algorithms. In addition to providing a fleet of 12 robots with baseline software and development tools, LittleDog served as a cross-team common platform that allowed direct comparison of results across multiple research teams. Here we report the details of this robotic system.