Legged robots on the Moon: what the ANYmal-D and Magnecko quadrupeds learnt in LUNA’s simulated regolith

A campaign carried out in 2025 at the LUNA facility showed that the quadrupeds traversed the simulated lunar regolith, but slipped, sank into it, kicked up dust and lost visibility under low-angle lighting.

Leg robots are often presented as good candidates for future lunar missions: where a wheeled rover stops on a steep slope, a loose ground or a field of rocks, a quadruped can theoretically pass. An article published on arXiv on October 8, 2026 confronts this promise to the ground, starting from the test campaign conducted in 2025 in the LUNA, a similar installation that reproduces the lunar surface.

It goes, but not without damage

Two machines, ANYmal-D and Magnecko, have travelled through the simulant of furniture regolith and a relief imitating craters, while recording long sequences of navigation and visual and inertial data under difficult lighting. Verdict: quadrupeds progress well on this ground, but their performance suffers from the sinking and slipping of the feet, contacts that raise dust and perception failures caused by overexposure, frank shadows and textureless areas.

The nine authors draw a roadmap: locomotion policies that take into account regolith, robust perception of lunar lighting conditions, similar reproducible tests and full mission-wide validation before considering deployment.