ANYmal take advantage of wheels/legs hybrid movement

A combination of leg motion and wheel speed could outperform nature itself:  ANYmal robotics built a robot capable of exploiting the best part of the two concepts creating a “quadruped robot on the wheels”.

The experiment succeed : the robot is capable of successful overcome obstacles for wheeled robots like slopes and stairs but also outperform quadruped robots in speed.

ANYmal robot is also capable to switch legs/wheels locomotion depending on the particular situation  : it could switch to legs locomotion depending on the electric “amp draw” on the wheels or if there are obstacles. The robot is also fairy compact, maintaining the similarity appearance to other quadruped robots like Spot or Cheetah.

We’ve seen a similar approach with Boston Dynamics’ Handle but applied to biped robots resulting in a big “dangerous” heavy robot. Is it quadruped-wheeled the way to go for future ?