A Survey of Legged Robotics in Non-Inertial Environments: Past, Present, and Future

TL;DR

This survey reviews modeling, estimation, and control techniques for legged robots operating in non-inertial environments, highlighting challenges, current solutions, and future research directions.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of the state of the art, analyzes limitations, and identifies open problems in legged robot locomotion in dynamic, non-inertial settings.

Findings

Summarizes key application domains and motion characteristics.

Analyzes root causes of locomotion performance degradation.

Discusses open problems and future research directions.

Abstract

Legged robots have demonstrated remarkable agility on rigid, stationary ground, but their locomotion reliability remains limited in non-inertial environments, where the supporting ground moves, tilts, or accelerates. Such conditions arise in ground transportation, maritime platforms, and aerospace settings, and they introduce persistent time-varying disturbances that break the stationary-ground assumptions underlying conventional legged locomotion. This survey reviews the state of the art in modeling, state estimation, and control for legged robots in non-inertial environments. We summarize representative application domains and motion characteristics, analyze the root causes of locomotion performance degradation, and review existing methods together with their key assumptions and limitations. We further identify open problems in robot-environment coupling, observability, robustness, and experimental validation, and discuss future directions in autonomy, system-level design, bio-inspired strategies, safety, and testing. The survey aims to clarify the technical foundations of this emerging area and support the development of reliable legged robots for real-world dynamic environments.