How to Choose a Robot Dog (Quadruped): The 2026 Buyer's Guide

The quadruped market splits neatly into two worlds that share a silhouette and almost nothing else. At one end is a $1,600 Unitree Go2 you can carry under one arm, flip open an app, and walk around a backyard. At the other is a $75,000-and-up Boston Dynamics Spot or an ANYbotics ANYmal that lives on a substation, walks a mission autonomously every four hours, docks itself to charge, and streams thermal and acoustic readings into an asset-management platform. Both are four-legged robots. Only one of them will do the job you have in mind, and buyers who reason from the shared silhouette rather than the mission routinely end up with the wrong one: a research lab that bought a sealed enterprise platform it cannot open and modify, or an inspection contractor that bought a consumer dog with no IP rating and no autonomy stack and now sends a human to teleoperate it around a plant.

The order that works is the same one that works for any capital robot. Fix what the machine is for first: what it carries, where it walks, whether a person is driving it or it runs on its own, who pays for the data it produces, and what an hour of its downtime costs you. That single decision collapses a confusing market into a shortlist of two or three platforms and one price band, and only then do payload, runtime, IP rating, and the autonomy package start to trade against each other in a way you can reason about. A quadruped is a mobile sensor carrier with a walking chassis, a battery, an autonomy stack, and (increasingly) a service contract attached. You are buying all five at once, and the legs are the part you will think about least a year in.

This guide is the hub for choosing a legged robot on this site. It gives you a decision framework organized by buyer segment, the handful of specs that actually decide a purchase and how to trade them off, the autonomy and docking questions that separate a teleoperated toy from an unattended inspection asset, price bands from consumer through developer to enterprise, the vendor landscape by category, and the total-cost-of-ownership and Robot-as-a-Service math that decides whether you buy or lease. Throughout it points at the deeper legged and quadruped hardware guide and at the live quadruped leaderboard, where you can sort real platforms by payload, runtime, speed, and price instead of trusting a launch video.

The take: Choose the mission before the machine, and let it pick your world. Consumer and developer dogs (Unitree Go2 and B2, DEEP Robotics Lite, the education SKUs) are open, cheap, and teleoperated or lightly autonomous, sized for research, learning, and light patrol. Enterprise platforms (Spot, ANYmal, DEEP Robotics X-series, Ghost Robotics Vision) are sealed, IP-rated, autonomous with self-docking, and priced with a service contract because you are buying inspection data on a schedule. The two questions that eliminate the most platforms fastest are "does a human drive it or must it run a mission unattended" and "do I need to open the SDK and modify it or do I need turnkey data out of the box." Answer those two and the shortlist writes itself.

Companion reading: legged & quadruped robot hardware, SLAM & localization, how to choose an AMR/AGV, how to choose a humanoid robot, and robot sensors.

Table of contents

1. Key takeaways
2. Start with the buyer segment
3. The specs that decide a purchase
4. Autonomy, SLAM, missions, and docks
5. The manipulator arm question
6. IP rating, terrain, and stairs
7. SDK, ROS, and how open the platform is
8. Price bands: what each one buys
9. The vendor landscape by category
10. Total cost of ownership and buy vs RaaS
11. A repeatable selection process
12. Frequently asked questions
13. Changelog

Start with the buyer segment

Five segments cover almost every quadruped purchase, and each one drives a different platform, price band, and set of priorities. Find yours here, then let it tell you which specs to weight.

Segment	What dominates the choice	Typical platform tier	Typical spend	Autonomy needed
Industrial inspection	IP rating, autonomy, docking, sensor payload, support	Enterprise	$75k to $200k+	Full autonomous missions
Security / patrol	Autonomy, runtime, thermal, night vision, ruggedness	Mid to enterprise	$20k to $150k	Autonomous or supervised
Research / education	Open SDK, ROS 2, price, community, spares	Consumer to developer	$1,600 to $100k	Teleoperated to custom
Defense	Ruggedness, RF resilience, endurance, ITAR/procurement	Enterprise / specialized	Procurement	Mission-dependent
Consumer / hobby	Price, app, ease of use, tricks, community	Consumer	$1,600 to $3,000	Teleoperated

A few of these deserve a sentence on what actually matters, because the headline (a dog that walks and does backflips) hides the real decision.

Industrial inspection. This is the largest commercial market and the one the enterprise platforms were built for. The dog walks a fixed route through a plant, substation, tunnel, or offshore module, reads analog gauges and digital displays with a zoom camera, takes thermal images of switchgear and bearings, records acoustic signatures for gas leaks and partial discharge, and feeds it all into an asset-management system. The deciding specs are IP rating (dust and washdown), autonomous mission execution with self-docking, the sensor payload, and a vendor that will support a fleet for years. Nobody buys these to drive around; they buy the data that comes off them on a schedule, which is why the software subscription is part of the purchase.

Security and patrol. Overlaps inspection but weights night operation, thermal and low-light cameras, longer autonomous or supervised patrol loops, and deterrence. Runtime and the ability to cover ground between docks matter more here than payload. Some of these are the same enterprise chassis with a patrol software stack instead of an inspection one.

Research and education. A different world. The deciding factors are an open SDK, ROS 2 support, low enough price to buy several, a documentation and community ecosystem, and access to spare legs and joints because students will break them. This is where the Unitree Go2 and B2, DEEP Robotics education units, and the older MIT Mini Cheetah lineage live, and where you deliberately want a robot you can open, reflash, and bolt things to.

Defense. A procurement world with its own rules: ruggedness, RF and GPS-denied resilience, endurance, and country-of-origin and ITAR constraints that remove much of the consumer market from consideration. Ghost Robotics built its business here, and the specifics are program-driven rather than catalog-driven.

Consumer and hobby. The Unitree Go2 at around $1,600 created this category. The deciding factors are price, a friendly app, ease of use, tricks and following behavior, and a community. Expect no IP rating worth relying on, short runtime, and teleoperation with light follow-me autonomy.

Rule of thumb: If you cannot say in one sentence what your quadruped carries, where it walks, and whether a person drives it, you are not ready to compare specs. "A sealed IP54 inspection dog that walks a 40-minute substation mission unattended and docks itself" is a filter. "A robot dog for our facility" is not.

The specs that decide a purchase

Once the segment is fixed, a handful of numbers do the real work. Here is what each one means and what it trades against, because on a legged robot every spec you raise costs you another somewhere else.

Payload. The mass the robot can carry and still walk reliably, mount sensors, and climb. Consumer dogs like the Go2 carry a few kilograms (roughly 3 to 8 kg usable). Mid platforms like the Unitree B2 and DEEP Robotics X20 carry 20 to 40 kg. Spot carries about 14 kg of payload with mounting rails and a documented power and data interface; ANYmal carries a comparable inspection payload. Payload trades against runtime and against joint life: a heavier load drains the battery faster and stresses the actuators on stairs. The honest number is the payload you can carry while still walking a full mission, which sits well below the momentary maximum.

Runtime and hot-swap. Quoted runtimes are best-case walking on flat ground with a light load. Real inspection work, especially with stairs and a sensor payload, cuts them hard. Typical figures: consumer dogs 1 to 2 hours, mid and enterprise platforms 1.5 to 4 hours, all derated 20 to 40% under load and terrain. Because no quadruped runs a full 8-hour shift on one charge, the spec that actually matters is how it recharges: hot-swappable battery packs (Spot, B2) let a human keep it working, and an autonomous charging dock lets it work unattended for days. Buy the recharge strategy; the raw hour figure matters little.

Speed. Most quadrupeds walk their missions at 0.5 to 1.5 m/s and can sprint faster (the Go2 tops out around 3.7 to 5 m/s depending on model, the B2 around 6 m/s, Spot around 1.6 m/s). Sprint speed makes launch videos; mission speed and stability on real terrain make schedules. For inspection, a slower, more stable gait that never falls is worth more than a fast one that stumbles on a grated walkway. Weight speed only if your job is coverage over ground (patrol, search) rather than careful reading of instruments.

IP rating. The two-digit ingress code (first digit dust, second water) decides where the robot can work. Consumer dogs are typically unrated or splash-resistant at best. Enterprise inspection platforms run IP54 to IP67: Spot is IP54, ANYmal and the DEEP Robotics X20 reach IP66 to IP67 for washdown and heavy rain. If your site is dusty, wet, or gets pressure-washed, this is a hard filter that removes the entire consumer market in one stroke.

Sensor and autonomy package. What the robot sees and how it navigates: a 3D LiDAR for mapping and obstacle avoidance, RGB and zoom cameras for reading gauges, a thermal camera for electrical and mechanical inspection, sometimes an acoustic array or gas sensor, and the onboard compute and software that turn those into an autonomous mission. This is often the largest part of the value and the price. See the next section, because autonomy is where the real money and the real differentiation sit.

Here is how the common trades line up:

You want more	You give up	When it is worth it
Payload	Runtime, joint life, cost	Multi-sensor inspection, manipulation
Runtime	Payload, weight, cost	Long patrol loops, remote sites
Speed	Stability, runtime	Patrol, search, coverage jobs
IP rating	Weight, cost, serviceability	Dusty, wet, washdown environments
Autonomy stack	Cost, openness (sealed)	Unattended missions, fleet ops
Openness / SDK	Turnkey autonomy, support	Research, custom behaviors

War story: A utility bought a mid-tier developer quadruped on payload and price because the spreadsheet said it carried more sensor mass than the enterprise unit for a third of the cost. On the substation it had no autonomous docking and no washdown rating, so a technician drove it by hand every round and wiped it down after every dusty walk. Within a quarter the labor of piloting it exceeded the price difference to the sealed, self-docking platform it should have bought. Payload was never the constraint. Unattended operation was.

Autonomy, SLAM, missions, and docks

Autonomy is the single line that separates a robot someone drives from an asset that produces data on its own, and it is where enterprise pricing comes from.

Teleoperation is the floor: a human drives the robot with a controller or app, on-board stabilization handles the walking, and the operator handles everything else. Every quadruped does this, and for research, one-off inspections, and hobby it is all you need.

Mapping and localization is the next step. The robot builds a map of the site with LiDAR and cameras (SLAM), then localizes itself against that map so it knows where it is on repeat visits. The quality of this stack is a real differentiator, and the underlying methods are worked through in the SLAM and localization guide. Enterprise platforms ship a mature, supported version of this; consumer platforms give you an SDK and expect you to build it.

Autonomous missions are the payoff for inspection. You walk the robot through a route once (or draw it on the map), tag the waypoints where it should stop and what it should capture (read this gauge, thermal-image that switchgear, listen at that valve), and from then on it repeats the mission on a schedule with no operator. Spot Autowalk and Orbit, ANYbotics' mission and data platform, and the DEEP Robotics equivalents are the software that makes this work, and the subscription for it is part of the enterprise price.

The dock is what makes autonomy unattended. A charging dock the robot walks onto and off of by itself closes the loop: the robot leaves the dock, runs its mission, returns, charges, and does it again for days or weeks without a human. Without a dock, autonomy still needs someone to charge and restart the robot, which is not truly unattended operation. If your case is repeat inspection, the dock is the spec that turns the purchase from a robot into a program, and you should confirm it exists, is supported, and works with your route before you buy.

Rule of thumb: Buy autonomy for the layer your mission needs and stop. Teleoperation for research and one-offs. Mapping and missions if you inspect the same site repeatedly. A self-docking station if that inspection has to run unattended. Paying for an autonomy stack you will drive by hand anyway is money spent on a subscription you will not open.

The manipulator arm question

An optional arm turns a quadruped from a mobile sensor into a mobile manipulator, and it is a large, separate decision. Spot's arm (a six-degree-of-freedom manipulator with a gripper) lets it open doors, turn valves, flip breakers, pick up objects, and place sensors, and it adds tens of thousands of dollars on top of the base robot (a Spot with the arm runs around $100,000 against roughly $75,000 for the base). Unitree and DEEP Robotics offer arm options on their larger platforms at lower cost and lower capability.

Weigh the arm on whether your job needs the robot to change the world rather than just observe it. Reading gauges, thermal imaging, and patrol need no arm. Opening a door to continue a route, operating a valve, collecting a sample, or manipulating equipment need one, and the arm's reach, payload, and precision then become their own spec sheet. An arm also adds weight (cutting runtime), a second point of failure, and a large price increment, so add it only when the mission has a physical task the base robot cannot skip. For most inspection buyers the honest answer is that the arm is a phase-two purchase after the base inspection program proves out.

IP rating, terrain, and stairs

Legged robots exist because wheels cannot climb stairs or cross rubble, so terrain capability is the reason to buy one over an AMR or AGV in the first place. If your environment is flat and clean, a wheeled robot is cheaper, faster, and more reliable, and you should read the AMR guide instead. The legged premium is worth paying when the route includes stairs, catwalks with grating, curbs, thresholds, gravel, snow, or debris that stops a wheeled base cold.

Stairs. Most serious quadrupeds climb and descend stairs, but the reliability and the maximum step height vary. Enterprise platforms handle industrial stairs and grating repeatably as part of a mission; consumer dogs manage gentle stairs in good conditions and struggle on open grating and steep runs. If stairs are on your route, confirm the platform climbs them under its own autonomy, working without an expert at the controls, on the kind of stairs you actually have.

Terrain and slopes. Rated slope angle (commonly 30 to 45 degrees), the ability to recover from slips and pushes, and self-righting after a fall separate a robot that finishes a mission from one that ends up on its side waiting for rescue. For outdoor and industrial sites, weight recovery behavior heavily, because a robot that cannot get up on its own is not unattended.

IP rating, covered in the spec section, is the other half of terrain: a robot that walks a substation also has to survive its dust and weather. Match the IP rating to the site, not to the brochure.

Safety rule: A legged robot near people is a moving machine that can fall, and the enterprise platforms carry emergency stops, defined safety zones, and operating procedures for a reason. Confirm the e-stop, the fall behavior, and the standoff distance around bystanders before you run a mission in an occupied area, and treat the robot as industrial equipment with a documented safe operating procedure rather than as a pet.

SDK, ROS, and how open the platform is

How open the platform is decides whether you can build on it, and it splits the market cleanly.

Open developer platforms (Unitree Go2-Edu and B2, DEEP Robotics developer units, the academic lineages) give you low-level joint access, an SDK in C++ and Python, ROS and ROS 2 support, and permission to modify the robot, mount your own compute, and write your own controllers. This is what research, teaching, and custom-behavior work require, and it is the reason a lab buys a Go2 over a Spot even though Spot is the more finished robot. The tradeoff is that you own the integration: the autonomy, the safety, and the reliability are yours to build.

Sealed enterprise platforms (Spot, ANYmal) give you a well-documented high-level API for payloads and missions but keep the low-level locomotion controller closed. You can add sensors, write mission logic, and integrate with your systems through the API, and you cannot rewrite how the robot walks. That is the correct tradeoff for an inspection buyer who wants a supported, reliable, warrantied robot and has no interest in gait research, and the wrong one for a locomotion lab.

The practical rule: match openness to whether your value is in the robot's behavior or in what the robot observes. Research and novel-behavior work need the open platforms. Inspection and patrol programs need the sealed, supported ones, and paying the openness tax (building your own stack) on an enterprise job is how programs stall. Both worlds speak ROS 2 to some degree, but confirm the specific SDK, language bindings, and ROS version against your team's skills before you commit.

Price bands: what each one buys

Quadruped pricing steps in bands rather than sloping, and each band unlocks something the one below cannot fake with an accessory. Prices are indicative for 2026 and cover the robot; software subscriptions, the arm, and support are extra at the top bands.

$1,600 to $3,000: consumer. The Unitree Go2 opened this band at around $1,600 for the base model, with higher trims adding better compute and LiDAR up to roughly $2,800. You get a capable walking robot, an app, tricks and follow-me, a basic sensor suite, and short runtime with no IP rating worth relying on. Right for hobby, demos, light education, and content. Do not expect autonomous missions, washdown durability, or fleet support.

$3,000 to $150,000: developer and mid-tier. A wide band. At the low end, the Go2-Edu and DEEP Robotics Lite units (roughly $3,000 to $15,000) add developer SDK access, ROS 2, and better sensors for research. In the middle, the Unitree B2 and DEEP Robotics X20 (roughly $50,000 to $150,000) bring 20 to 40 kg payload, IP-rated bodies, longer runtime, and the beginnings of an autonomy and docking stack at a fraction of the enterprise leaders' price. This band is where a lot of 2026 buying is moving as the Chinese platforms close the capability gap.

$75,000 and up: enterprise. Boston Dynamics Spot starts around $75,000 for the base robot and rises well past $150,000 with the arm, extra sensors, docks, and the Orbit software subscription. ANYbotics ANYmal is priced as a complete inspection solution, typically well into six figures with software and support, and is usually sold as a program rather than a robot. This band buys IP-rated ruggedness, mature autonomous missions and self-docking, a supported fleet and data platform, warranty, and a vendor that will still exist and service the fleet in five years.

Band	Get	Do not expect	Best for
$1,600 to $3,000	Walking robot, app, tricks, basic sensors	Autonomy, IP rating, support	Hobby, demos, light education
$3,000 to $15,000	SDK, ROS 2, developer sensors	Turnkey missions, washdown, fleet ops	Research, teaching, prototyping
$50,000 to $150,000	Payload, IP rating, emerging autonomy/dock	The most mature software, long support history	Mid-tier inspection, cost-sensitive programs
$75,000+	Rugged autonomy, self-dock, supported fleet+data	A cheap total cost of ownership	Enterprise inspection, security, defense

Rule of thumb: Buy the band your deliverable requires, then stop. A research lab paying enterprise money for a sealed robot it cannot modify has overbought; an inspection contractor buying a consumer dog and trying to bolt autonomy onto it has underbought and will pay the difference in labor. Sort the quadruped leaderboard by price against payload, runtime, and IP rating to see where the value steps actually fall in the current generation.

The vendor landscape by category

The market has settled into recognizable camps by 2026. Knowing who plays where shortens your shortlist.

Enterprise inspection leaders. Boston Dynamics (Spot) and ANYbotics (ANYmal) are the two names that dominate serious industrial inspection, with the deepest autonomy, the most mature mission and data software, self-docking, and the support organizations that large operators require. They are the expensive, safe choices when the deliverable is inspection data on a schedule and downtime is costly.

Fast-moving mid-tier. DEEP Robotics (X20, X30, Lite series) and Unitree (B2, B2-W wheeled-leg) have closed much of the capability gap at a fraction of the price, adding IP ratings, payload, and autonomy that put them into real inspection and patrol contention, especially where budget matters and the country-of-origin question does not bind the buyer. This is the most competitive part of the market.

Consumer and developer. Unitree (Go2, Go2-Edu) owns the low end and the research market by price and by openness, and is the default first quadruped for labs and hobbyists. DEEP Robotics and a handful of others compete in education.

Defense and specialized. Ghost Robotics built its Vision platform for defense and security, with ruggedness, RF resilience, and procurement suited to that world, and country-of-origin considerations that favor it for US government buyers. Defense buying is program-driven and outside the catalog logic of the rest of this guide.

War story: A buyer standardized a five-site inspection program on a mid-tier platform chosen purely on price and payload, then discovered eighteen months in that the vendor's mission software and dock were not mature enough to run truly unattended and that spare joints took weeks to arrive. The hardware was fine. The program stalled on the software and the support, which is exactly the part that the enterprise premium pays for. Price the software and the support, with the robot as the smaller line.

Total cost of ownership and buy vs RaaS

The robot's sticker price is often the smaller half of what a quadruped program costs over two years. The parts that decide the real number:

Software subscriptions. Enterprise autonomy, mission, and data platforms (Spot Orbit, ANYbotics' software, the mid-tier equivalents) carry annual subscriptions that recur for the life of the robot. Budget these as an ongoing line that recurs every year, and confirm what happens to your missions and data if you stop paying.

The arm, sensors, and dock. A manipulator arm adds a large increment on top of the base price. Extra thermal, acoustic, or gas sensors add up. A self-docking station is a real hardware cost. These are the accessories that make the robot useful for a specific job, and they are rarely in the headline price.

Training and integration. Someone has to map the site, build the missions, integrate the data into your systems, and train operators. For an enterprise program this is a project with real hours behind it, and it is the part that most often runs long.

Spares and support. Legs, joints (the actuators are the wear items), batteries, and feet are consumables on a robot that walks industrial routes. Confirm parts availability, lead times, and a support contract with a response time you can live with before you standardize a fleet.

Buy vs Robot-as-a-Service. Because the all-in number is large and the software and support are ongoing, many enterprise buyers now lease under Robot-as-a-Service (RaaS): a monthly fee that bundles the robot, the software, maintenance, and support, often with the vendor or an integrator running the program. RaaS turns a large capital purchase and an uncertain support burden into a predictable operating cost, lets you scale up or down, and shifts the reliability risk to the provider. Buy outright when you have the in-house capability to run and maintain the fleet and want to amortize a known workload over years; lease under RaaS when you want the outcome (inspection data) without owning the robotics competency, or when you are piloting and do not yet want to commit capital. For a first industrial deployment, a RaaS pilot is usually the lower-risk way to find out whether a quadruped fits your site before you buy a fleet.

Rule of thumb: Price the first two years of ownership. Robot plus software subscription plus the arm and sensors you need plus a dock plus training plus spares and support is the real number, and for enterprise it is frequently double the hardware price. If that number is uncertain or the workload is unproven, lease under RaaS first and buy only once the program pays for itself.

A repeatable selection process

Put it together into a checklist you can run for any purchase, from a single research dog to an inspection fleet.

1. Write the mission in one sentence, including what it carries, where it walks, and whether a human drives it. "A sealed IP54 inspection dog that walks a 40-minute substation mission unattended and docks itself" or "an open ROS 2 research quadruped for gait experiments." If you cannot, stop here.
2. Pick your world from two questions: teleoperated or unattended, and open SDK or turnkey data. Those two answers place you in consumer/developer or in enterprise before any spec.
3. Confirm the hard filters: IP rating for your environment, stairs and terrain your route actually has, and country-of-origin or ITAR constraints if you are a government or defense buyer. Any of these can remove a whole tier in one stroke.
4. Set your price band from the segment and the mission, using the band table, and remember the software and arm sit on top of the hardware price.
5. Rank the two or three specs your mission cares about and accept the trades on the rest. Inspection ranks IP rating, autonomy, and docking; research ranks openness and price; patrol ranks runtime and thermal.
6. Decide the autonomy layer you need (teleoperation, mapping, missions, self-docking) and confirm the platform ships and supports it rather than promising it.
7. Decide the arm on whether the mission has a physical task the base robot cannot skip, and treat it as a phase-two purchase if it does not.
8. Check the SDK and ROS support against your team's skills, and the spares and support against your uptime needs.
9. Build the real budget: robot plus software subscription plus arm and sensors plus dock plus training plus spares and support over two years, and compare it against a RaaS lease.
10. Shortlist on the leaderboard, sorting live platforms by the specs you ranked, and validate with a pilot or a demo on your actual site before you commit a fleet.

Run this in order and the shortlist narrows to one or two platforms you can buy with confidence. Skip the mission and the world-picking steps and you will do what most first-time buyers do, which is fall for a backflip video and discover the missing dock, IP rating, or SDK after the purchase order clears.

Frequently asked questions

How much does a robot dog cost? It spans two orders of magnitude. A consumer Unitree Go2 starts around $1,600, developer units with SDK access run $3,000 to $15,000, mid-tier inspection platforms like the Unitree B2 and DEEP Robotics X20 run roughly $50,000 to $150,000, and enterprise leaders like Boston Dynamics Spot start around $75,000 and rise past $150,000 with the arm, sensors, docks, and software subscription. Price the two-year total including software and support, which for enterprise runs well beyond the sticker and is often double the hardware.

What is the difference between a Unitree Go2 and a Boston Dynamics Spot? They share a shape and little else. The Go2 is a $1,600 open, teleoperated consumer and research robot with a basic sensor suite, short runtime, and no serious IP rating. Spot is a $75,000-plus sealed, IP54, autonomous inspection platform with mission software, self-docking, an optional arm, and enterprise support. You buy a Go2 to learn, teach, or research; you buy a Spot to run unattended inspection missions and get data on a schedule.

How long does a quadruped run on a charge? Most walk 1 to 4 hours per charge, and that figure drops 20 to 40% under a sensor payload and on stairs. Because none runs a full 8-hour shift, the spec that matters is how it recharges: hot-swappable batteries let a person keep it working, and an autonomous charging dock lets it work unattended for days. Buy the recharge strategy rather than the raw runtime number.

Can these robots really climb stairs and rough terrain? Yes, and that terrain capability is the reason to buy a legged robot over a cheaper wheeled AMR. Enterprise platforms climb industrial stairs and grating repeatably as part of an autonomous mission and handle 30 to 45 degree slopes; consumer dogs manage gentle stairs in good conditions and struggle on open grating. If stairs are on your route, confirm the platform climbs them under its own autonomy, working without an expert pilot, on the kind of stairs you actually have.

Do I need the autonomy package and a dock, or can I just drive it? It depends entirely on the job. For research, one-off inspections, and hobby, teleoperation is all you need and the autonomy subscription is wasted money. For repeat inspection of the same site, autonomous missions plus a self-docking station are what turn the robot from a demo someone drives into an asset that produces data unattended, and that combination is where the enterprise price comes from. Buy the autonomy layer your mission needs and no more.

Which platform is best for research and university work? An open developer platform: the Unitree Go2-Edu or B2, or a DEEP Robotics developer unit, chosen for low-level joint access, a C++ and Python SDK, ROS 2 support, a documented community, and a price low enough to buy several and accept breakage. The point of a research dog is a robot you can open, reflash, and modify, which the sealed enterprise platforms deliberately prevent. Confirm the exact SDK, language bindings, and ROS 2 version against your team's skills before buying.

Should I buy or lease under Robot-as-a-Service? Buy outright when you have the in-house capability to run and maintain the fleet and a proven, steady workload to amortize over years. Lease under RaaS when you want the inspection outcome without owning the robotics competency, when you are piloting and do not want to commit capital, or when you want the vendor to carry the reliability and support risk. For a first industrial deployment, a RaaS pilot is usually the lower-risk way to prove the fit before committing to a fleet purchase.

Do quadrupeds need safety measures around people? Yes. A legged robot is industrial equipment that can fall and that moves autonomously, so treat it accordingly: confirm the emergency stop, the fall and self-righting behavior, and the standoff distance around bystanders, and run it under a documented safe operating procedure in occupied areas. Enterprise platforms build in e-stops and defined safety zones for this reason. It is not a pet, and the difference matters most in exactly the crowded environments where it looks most approachable.

Why choose a legged robot over a wheeled AMR? Only for terrain a wheeled robot cannot cross: stairs, grating, curbs, thresholds, gravel, snow, and debris. If your route is flat and clean, a wheeled AMR or AGV is cheaper, faster, longer-running, and more reliable, and you should buy that instead. The legged premium is real and worth paying when, and only when, the environment stops wheels cold.