Ghost was founded by Avik De and Gavin Kenneally in late 2015 at the urging of Daniel Koditschek, Alfred Fitler Moore Professor of ESE at the University of Pennsylvania Engineering School, and the foremost authority in the field of bio-inspired robotics. Both were working on a range of difficult problems associated with commercializing legged robots. While bipedal and quadrupedal robots may be theoretically superior to wheels and tracks, the complexity and costs associated with deploying commercial solutions has been a major roadblock. Many years of work on direct-drive quadrupedal robot designs and locomotion led to the launch of Ghost Robotics and belief that affordable legged robots were not too far off in the future. They were joined by Jiren Parikh at inception, with support from the University of Pennsylvania.