That's a biomimicking big cat bounding across the lawn at MIT. Developed by mechanical engineer Sangbae Kim and his team, the robo-cheetah can currently run 10 miles per hour and jump over objects in its way. The scientists building it say this version of the robot could soon run as fast as 30 mph—not fast enough to match a real cheetah sprinting across the African grassland, but fast enough to haunt your dreams.
The cheetah robot is supported by DARPA, which hopes to use this kind of technology in search and rescue operations—the thinking being that small bots that travel by legs or some other kind of biologically inspired locomotion could go places a wheeled machine could not. Impressively, the robo-cheetah's "bounding algorithm" helps it to exert just the right amount of force when its legs strike the ground, making the four-legged machine both agile and able to keep up its speed over rough terrain.
Remember, though, that this isn't the first running cheetah robot. In 2012, robotics company/maker of nightmare machines Boston Dynamics introducing a 28.3 mph cheetah robot, which it then scaled up into a rugged, untethered beast called WildCat. Shortly thereafter Google acquired Boston Dynamics and company has been relatively quiet since. So who knows—they might have a big cat bot more advanced than the real thing in a secret warehouse somewhere.
Andrew's from Nebraska. His work has also appeared in Discover, The Awl, Scientific American, Mental Floss, Playboy, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn with two cats and a snake.
