From Italy comes HyQ, a quadroped robot that looks like competition for Boston Dynamics Big Dog. Unlike Big Dog which is a completely proprietary project in which all the research is kept secret from other robotics researchers, HyQ follows the more traditional research philosophy familiar to open source developers. Researcher Claudio Semini says:

BigDog is a black box -- nobody knows exactly what designs, materials, controllers they are using. We want to make our design as open as possible.

HyQ can run and dynamically balance pretty well, as seen in the above video. Big Dog has a huge head start on HyQ so this should be an interesting competition to watch and see how open research fairs against proprietary strategies. For more, check out the IEEE Spectrum article on HyQ or visit HyQ's website