It's such a wild perspective too because like, everything the US is doing is public because it's all just corporations fishing for more investor money or trying to look as advanced as they can possibly fake so their current shareholders get more wealth from people believing the shares are worth more and might be worth even more in the future. There are no particularly shadowy programs, apart from proprietary AI labs that are being cagey about how they're training their dumbshit chatbots while issuing press releases like "our super special robot boy is so smart, you wouldn't believe it, we're totally too scared to even show him to you because he might have attained godhood, he's even autocompleting a quarter of every line of code that gets written! Which definitely isn't only a modest improvement over existing IDE autocompletes or boilerplate macros at all!" to try to get more funding and pump their shareholder value.
I mean, have any of them looked at robotics papers over the last two decades? Like the authors and institutions that are involved? You could see this clear from space that China was dominating this field by sheer output.
wow giving them wheels is a neat trick. I'd guess it sacrifices durability (compared to peg feet), maybe weight capacity as well. But the speed gains are immense!
i can't watch the video thru this link but from what i gather its like the boston dynamics robodog but with wheels for feet. adding wheels to robot legs is probably the Coolest design choice possible. it's ingenious really, you need something to be the 'foot', and that something might as well have built-in shock absorption and also spin to provide a traversal option that circumvents the major disadvantage of legged vehicles, speed on flat ground, without removing the capacity to use the legs to traverse more complicated terrain. skating quadruped robots might even handle terrain at speed that a car or traditional UGV might not ever be able to handle, using the agility provided by legs to position wheels. i want my car to be an oversized one of these so badly. i can't wait until someone makes a useable larger bipedal version of this, make my skating mecha dreams come true!
frankly tho i would just put the wheels on the main chassis separate from the legs for simplicity's sake, used with legs folded more like a traditional wheeled craft, so the wheels are still useable if the legs break and you don't have to put electric motors or wiring or whatever in inconvenient places through the legs. it would lose a little agility without 'mech skating' but i think it might be worth it for reliability/ease of manufacture/repair.