Stealth Cheetah Robot Sprints Like a Cat (Video)

The robot cheetah. — The robot cheetah can navigate uneven terrain and can jump over a foot in the air to avoid obstacles.

(Image credit: Jose-Luis Olivares/MIT)

Robots are likely not the first thing you think of when you hear the word "speed," but one group of researchers is trying to quell the stereotype of a lumbering robot with a machine built to move more like one of nature's quickest creatures — the cheetah.

To get the four-legged machine to run like its big-cat inspiration, researchers created an algorithm that controls the amount of force exerted by each of the robot's legs as it hits the ground. Having a high degree of control over force is important because it allows the researchers to manage the robot's speed, said Sangbae Kim, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, who helped develop the cheetah bot.

By adopting this force-based approach to building speed, the researchers were able to build a bot that can handle rough terrain, Kim said. In the same way that a cheetah can bound over a rock that sticks out of the savannah, the robot cheetah can jump over obstacles in its path. In treadmill experiments, the researchers found that the bot could jump over foam obstacles that are more than a foot (30 centimeters) tall.