A Survey of Legged Robotics in Non-Inertial Environments: Past, Present, and Future
For researchers and engineers working on legged robotics, this survey provides a structured overview of challenges and methods in non-inertial environments, an emerging area with limited prior synthesis.
This survey reviews the state of the art in modeling, state estimation, and control for legged robots in non-inertial environments (moving, tilting, or accelerating ground). It identifies open problems and future directions, aiming to support development of reliable legged robots for dynamic real-world environments.
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.