Luca Marchioni, robotics engineer at PAL Robotics, presents the design and early development of the Kangaroo legged robot at the ICRA 2021 Workshop on Legged Robots.
Marchioni says PAL Robotics wanted to explore dynamic movement like jumping while keeping the hardware powerful, reliable, and repairable. An initial estimate suggested a 40-kilogram robot could jump 200 millimeters with an average of 360 watts per leg.
After comparing leg designs from TALOS, Atlas, Mini Cheetah, Handle, Cassie, and others, the team developed a concept using one linear actuator and two linkages for near-vertical foot movement. The design places actuators closer to the body to reduce leg inertia, though its nonlinear transmission adds control complexity.
The team chose ball screws to handle force and impact loads, designing for forces up to 10 kilonewtons and adding custom load cells. Kangaroo has 12 degrees of freedom implemented with linear actuators; its leg-length actuator can reach 3 meters per second and produce 1 kilonewton of vertical force. The team also built motor-control boards intended to support embedded force control and integrated the transmission into the ros_control hardware abstraction.
A 25-kilogram leg-length prototype achieved 300-millimeter jumps, with takeoff speeds around 2.4 to 2.5 meters per second and measured forces near 800 newtons. A differential hip test bench demonstrated gravity compensation with 20- and 40-kilogram loads and tracked a sinusoidal position trajectory under a 20-kilogram load. In simulation, a reaction MPC controller adapted footsteps under disturbances up to 160 newtons.
Marchioni says the architecture is intended for dynamic motion and impact resilience, and that numerical methods can handle the nonlinear transmission within whole-body control. The first robot unit was being manufactured, with a full humanoid version including arms planned by year end. He says the actuators have no elastic elements, but their backdrivability and active control can provide compliance.
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Albert from PAL Robotics and Olivier Stasse, a robotics researcher and head of the robotics department at LAAS-CNRS, present PAL’s robots and research partnerships at VivaTech 2026 in Paris, with Maximilian operating the Kangaroo.
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Francesco Ferro, CEO of PAL Robotics, joins host Edgar Guerrero in Barcelona to discuss service robots, their uses in industry and care, and what it will take to bring them into daily life.
