It takes money to do things in robotics. It took $125 million in DARPA funding to get to Big Dog. It took entire CS departments at big name schools with tech support from auto companies (Stanford's VW was made computer-drivable for them by VW) to win the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2005.

You can't do this on YCombinator-scale peanuts. That's what academic robotics looked like for decades, and progress was very, very slow.