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MIT's Robot Cheetah Can Run and Jump as Quietly as a Ninja

"Our robot can be silent and as efficient as animals. The only things you hear are the feet hitting the ground."
Screengrab: MIT/YouTube

Robots are more mobile than ever. You've got Boston Dynamics' horse-like bot, which is being field tested by the military. There's also this Japanese robot that can do flips on the go. But compared to MIT's Cheetah robot, those agile bots are almost nothing if not noisy heaps of metal.

Cheetah, seen above, can silently run and jump over rough terrain thanks to a new algorithm and electric engine that better mimic animal running. It has several distinct advantages over its contemporaries, like Boston Dynamics' WildCat, which can bound and gallop at 16 miles per hour on flat ground. Save the sound of its footfalls, Cheetah is eerily silent. And it can run and jump over obstacles on rough terrain.

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But the secret sauce is in an algorithmic breakthrough that has Cheetah;s creators saying that it will eventually reach speeds of 30 miles per hour, although its bounding gait currently tops out at 10. Basically, the algorithm allows the quadrupedal bot to carefully control the power of its footfalls, striking the ground with more or less force, depending on what's needed.

"Many sprinters, like Usain Bolt, don't cycle their legs really fast," Sangbae Kim, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, said in a statement. "They actually increase their stride length by pushing downward harder and increasing their ground force, so they can fly more while keeping the same frequency."

According to the researchers, Cheetah is also the first robot to make use of an electric engine to run and jump, proving that they're not only as powerful as combustion engines, but more practical due to their lower noise output. One can easily imagine, with no small amount of discomfort, how the military might weaponize this sort of thing. It's also telling that the research, like much of advanced robotics today, is being funded by  DARPA, the Pentagon's blue-sky research wing.

"Our robot can be silent and as efficient as animals. The only things you hear are the feet hitting the ground," Kim said. "This is kind of a new paradigm where we're controlling force in a highly dynamic situation. Any legged robot should be able to do this in the future."

The researchers also vaguely hinted at the possibility that future versions of Cheetah could eventually replace cars, which I imagine would look like a bit like a robotic Mad Max, with legions of spike-laden, football pad-wearing raiders bounding bareback across a dystopian America on silent Cheetah bots.

I'm not holding my breath, at least not yet. That vision—or, more likely, a less feverish and dystopic version of it—still seems pretty far off, and will require a lot more research. Meantime, Cheetah's latest advancements will provide ample fuel for my darker robotic dreams.