Abstract Nowadays, legged robots often use speaker recognition or Ultra Wide Band(UWB) positioning to identify and track certain people. However, these identification methods need the active cooperation of the identified person, which limits their application. To solve this problem, we propose a “Symmetry-encoding and pseudo-Centroid loss optimized Gait recognition method” (SCGait). The experimental results show that our gait recognition method achieves a mean test accuracy of 82.2% on three subsets of the CASIA-B dataset, and the ablation studies show that our gait encoding method and loss function have good generalization ability. Next, we combine SCGait with Yolo to develop a person identification-tracking system for legged robots. The experimental results show that our system performs quite well in both home companion and industrial patrol legged robots. It achieves an identification accuracy of 91.8% and a FPS of 36 in our test video in a multi-person scene. The code is available at https://github.com/qplqplqpl/SCGait. Similar content being viewed by others Data availability Data is provided within the manuscript. The code is available at https://github.com/qplqplqpl/SCGait. References Miki, T. et al. Learning robust perceptive locomotion for quadrupedal robots in the wild. Sci. Robot. 7(62), eabk2822. https://doi.org/10.1126/scirobotics.abk2822 (2022). Chi, P. et al. Towards new-generation of intelligent welding manufacturing: A systematic review on 3D vision measurement and path planning of humanoid welding robots, Measurement, 116065, (2024). Tuasikal, D. A. A., Fakhrurroja, H. & Machbub, C. Voice activation using speaker recognition for controlling humanoid robot, in IEEE 8th International Conference on System Engineering and Technology (ICSET), 2018: IEEE, pp. 79–84. (2018). Li, S.-A. et al. Voice interaction recognition design in real-life scenario mobile robot applications. Appl. Sci. 13(5), 3359 (2023). Zheng, S. et al. Multi-robot relative positioning and orientation system based on UWB range and graph optimization. Measurement 195, 111068. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.measurement.2022.111068 (2022). Yang, X., Huang, X., Zhang, Y.,