Accurate state estimation and multi-modal perception are prerequisites for autonomous legged robots in complex, large-scale environments. To date, no large-scale public legged-robot dataset captures the real-world conditions needed to develop and benchmark algorithms for legged-robot state estimation, perception, and navigation. To address this, we introduce the GrandTour dataset, a multi-modal legged-robotics dataset collected across challenging outdoor and indoor environments, featuring an ANYbotics ANYmal-D quadruped equipped with the Boxi multi-modal sensor payload. GrandTour spans a broad range of environments and operational scenarios across distinct test sites, ranging from alpine scenery and forests to demolished buildings and urban areas, and covers a wide variation in scale, complexity, illumination, and weather conditions. The dataset provides time-synchronized sensor data from spinning LiDARs, multiple RGB cameras with complementary characteristics, proprioceptive sensors, and stereo depth cameras. Moreover, it includes high-precision ground-truth trajectories from satellite-based RTK-GNSS and a Leica Geosystems total station. This dataset supports research in SLAM, high-precision state estimation, and multi-modal learning, enabling rigorous evaluation and development of new approaches to sensor fusion in legged robotic systems. With its extensive scope, GrandTour represents the largest open-access legged-robotics dataset to date. The dataset is available at https://grand-tour.leggedrobotics.com on HuggingFace (ROS-independent), and in ROS formats, along with tools and demo resources.
The Great Outdoors (GO) dataset is a multi-modal annotated data resource aimed at advancing ground robotics research in unstructured environments. Existing off-road datasets often lack sensor diversity and exclude vital modalities like thermal and radar that are critical for operation in degraded conditions (e.g., low visibility or adverse weather). To address these gaps, we introduce a large-scale multimodal off-road dataset with six complementary sensor modalities, along with semantic annotations and GPS traces, to support tasks such as semantic segmentation, object detection, and SLAM. The diverse environmental conditions represented in the dataset present significant real-world challenges, which provide opportunities to develop more robust solutions to support the continued advancement of field robotics, autonomous exploration, and perception systems in natural environments. The dataset can be downloaded at: https://www.unmannedlab.org/the-great-outdoors-dataset/
The Boreas Road Trip (Boreas-RT) dataset extends the multi-season Boreas dataset to new and diverse locations that pose challenges for modern autonomous driving algorithms. Boreas-RT comprises 60 sequences collected over 9 real-world routes, totalling 643 km of driving. Each route is traversed multiple times, enabling evaluation in identical environments under varying traffic and, in some cases, weather conditions. The data collection platform includes a 5MP FLIR Blackfly S camera, a 360 degree Navtech RAS6 Doppler-enabled spinning radar, a 128-channel 360 degree Velodyne Alpha Prime lidar, an Aeva Aeries II FMCW Doppler-enabled lidar, a Silicon Sensing DMU41 inertial measurement unit, and a Dynapar wheel encoder. Centimetre-level ground truth is provided via post-processed Applanix POS LV GNSS-INS data. The dataset includes precise extrinsic and intrinsic calibrations, a publicly available development kit, and a live leaderboard for odometry and metric localization. Benchmark results show that many state-of-the-art odometry and localization algorithms overfit to simple driving environments and degrade significantly on the more challenging Boreas-RT routes. Boreas-RT provides a unified dataset for evaluating multi-modal algorithms across diverse road conditions. The dataset, leaderboard, and development kit are available at www.boreas.utias.utoronto.ca.
Daniil Lisus, Katya M. Papais, Cedric Le Gentil +4
Robust and accurate proprioceptive state estimation of the main body is crucial for legged robots to execute tasks in extreme environments where exteroceptive sensors, such as LiDARs and cameras, may become unreliable. In this paper, we propose DogLegs, a state estimation system for legged robots that fuses the measurements from a body-mounted inertial measurement unit (Body-IMU), joint encoders, and multiple leg-mounted IMUs (Leg-IMU) using an extended Kalman filter (EKF). The filter system contains the error states of all IMU frames. The Leg-IMUs are used to detect foot contact, thereby providing zero-velocity measurements to update the state of the Leg-IMU frames. Additionally, we compute the relative position constraints between the Body-IMU and Leg-IMUs by the leg kinematics and use them to update the main body state and reduce the error drift of the individual IMU frames. Field experimental results have shown that our proposed DogLegs system achieves better state estimation accuracy compared to the traditional leg odometry method (using only Body-IMU and joint encoders) across various terrains. We make our code and datasets publicly available to benefit the research community (https://github.com/YibinWu/DogLegs).