Researchers at MIT have been trying to understand animal locomotion and thanks to the development of a recent “bounding” algorithm, those researchers are now making great strides. They have created a robotic cheetah which they hope will simulate and ultimately match the abilities of an actual cheetah. Currently the MIT robot cheetah can run up to 10 mph and jump over a 33 cm high obstacle. The goal of this research?

“Recently we are focusing on quadrupeds, or four-legged animals and we try to understand how they efficiently run in the field and nature so that we can take that inspiration and then use it in our engineering world. So for example we can create prosthetic legs out of that technology and you could even make new transportation replacing cars so that you don’t need the road in our world.”

 Watch a video of Robo-Cheetah in action, along with interviews with the researchers, AFTER THE JUMP…