This Robotic Pack Mule Can Carry Your Gear (and You)

This article is part of our exclusive IEEE Journal Watch series in partnership with IEEE Xplore.

The useful niche that quadrupedal robots seem to have found for themselves, at least for the moment, is infrastructure inspection. They’ve had a mild to moderate amount of success monitoring industrial sites, tracking construction progress, and things of that nature. Which is great! But when you look at what humans have historically relied on quadrupeds for, there’s a little bit of situational awareness (in the form of security), but the majority of what these animals have done for us is…