Marco Hutter - "The New Era of Mobility: Humanoids and Quadrupeds Enter the Real World"

Why It Matters

Legged robots are transitioning from lab curiosities to industrial tools, lowering human risk and cost in inspection and maintenance while enabling new autonomous services in environments unsuited for wheeled machines. This shift creates commercial opportunities across energy, chemical, offshore and infrastructure sectors and accelerates broader adoption of mobile robotics.

Summary

Marco Hutter traced the rapid maturation of legged robotics from his ETH Zurich PhD work on dynamically balancing quadrupeds to commercial deployments today, highlighting advances in actuation, autonomy, sensing and system-level robustness. He described early field trials that exposed reliability gaps, leading to iterative engineering, industrialized actuator modules, and the 2016 founding of ANYbotics to build inspection robots for hazardous and hard-to-reach environments. Hutter showed that modern legged robots are now commodity platforms used for thermal, visual and acoustic inspection—able to operate day or night, indoors and outdoors, and to integrate with digital twins and operator dashboards. He emphasized rigorous testing, certifications (including ATEX), and that the technology is now accessible enough for education and new business experiments.

Original Description

Speaker Biography

Marco is a professor for robotic systems and director of the Center for Robotics at ETH Zurich. Since 2024, he leads the Zurich office of the RAI Institute. His research interests are in the development of novel machines and machines and their intelligence to operate in rough and challenging environments. Together with his team, he realized a number of legged robots, mobile manipulators, and autonomous excavators that find applications including industrial inspection, construction and forest operations, household assistance, and extraterrestrial exploration. Marco is a co-founder of several ETH Startups that commercialize technology ranging from legged robots and autonomous construction equipment.

Abstract

Legged robotics has made remarkable strides in recent years, with quadrupeds and humanoids beginning to demonstrate real value in practical applications. Beyond the rapid advances in hardware, breakthroughs in perception, navigation, planning, and reinforcement learning for locomotion have unlocked unprecedented levels of mobility and autonomy on challenging terrain. In this talk, I will explore how reinforcement learning and autonomy are transforming the capabilities of legged robots and other mobile machines. I will share insights into the underlying methodologies, highlight real-world deployments "in the wild," and discuss where we stand today in the long-envisioned journey toward a ubiquitous robotic workforce.