Walking-robot technology has already achieved an important stage of development, as demonstrated in a few real applications. However, walking robots still need further improvement if they are to compete with traditional vehicles. A potential improvement could be made through optimization at design time. A better distribution of the legs around a robot’s body can help decrease actuator size in the design procedure and reduce power consumption during walking as well, which is of vital importance in autonomous robots. This paper, thus, presents a method focused on the distribution of legs around the body to decrease maximum foot forces against the ground, which play heavily in determining robot shape and actuator size. Some experiments have been performed with the SILO6 walking robot to validate the theoretical results.The authors would like to acknowledge the financial support of the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science through Grant DPI2004-05824.Peer reviewed