Although the article begins with a photo of a quadruped robot, it focuses mostly on the software - path planning side of robotics. While still a very active research field, BD and any other places doing legs are much more concerned with mechanical - dynamics, actuators, battery, locomotion problems.
If you want to do some real work on those, pursuing grad school in Electrical (actuators, battery) / Mechanical Engineering (legs, locomotion) is the best, and for the legged robots industry probably the only way (same goes for biomimetics - robot hands). The related research area encapsulating the above is called passive dynamics and primarily is a control theory-based field.
Yup, BD is doing amazing things in the hardware space, though obviously still loads of planning & SW involved in their robot. One of their engineers gave a talk at my campus last semester, crazy what they are doing now with pushing the limits on topological optimisation, printing components including metal etc to push weight down and strength up.
In the article I focus mostly on the software aspects b/c it's more accessible when getting started if you aren't in grad school (+ what I have most experience with).
Hi, I didn't know you were the OP of the article. If you're interested in adding a Books section in the future, you may want to include Robotics: Modelling, Planning and Control by Bruno Siciliano, an all-time classic reading in most introductory robotics university courses.
If you want to do some real work on those, pursuing grad school in Electrical (actuators, battery) / Mechanical Engineering (legs, locomotion) is the best, and for the legged robots industry probably the only way (same goes for biomimetics - robot hands). The related research area encapsulating the above is called passive dynamics and primarily is a control theory-based field.