Autonomous Industrial Inspection with Quadruped Robots: A Systematic Literature Review

Quadruped robots are increasingly used for industrial inspection because they can traverse stairs, clutter, and uneven terrain built for people. This paper presents a Systematic Literature Review (SLR), following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) 2020 guidelines, of autonomous inspection with quadruped robots validated on physical hardware. Scopus, Web of Science, IEEE Xplore, and the ACM Digital Library were searched between 13 and 16 August 2026 for studies published from 2018 to 2026. Of 745 unique records and 1 study found through citation searching, 88 full-text reports were assessed against explicit eligibility criteria and an eight-criterion quality rubric, three criteria of which (mission focus, autonomy integration, and environmental fidelity) acted as eligibility gates; 32 studies were included. They were synthesized narratively by mission control, localization and mapping, navigation, active inspection, and validation approach. Robots reach inspection targets in real facilities, mostly on commercial platforms with vendor or open-source LiDAR localization, but only 4 of the 32 studies let inspection results change the mission, only 3 quantify localization accuracy on hardware, 14 report no statistics over repeated runs, and 27 provide no public code or data. The evidence is limited by single-reviewer selection, short deployments, heterogeneous metrics, and a likely bias toward successful demonstrations.