Running Robot Breaks Speed Record

From the NY Times online...

Running Robot Breaks Speed Record
By JOHN MARKOFF
Published: March 6, 2012

A design firm financed by the Pentagon has broken a 23-year-old speed record for legged robots. Boston Dynamics, founded by Marc Raibert, a former M.I.T. roboticist, released a video on YouTube on Monday of its four-legged Cheetah prototype running on a treadmill at 18 miles per hour. The treadmill is designed to support speeds up to 50 m.p.h., but the company said it planned to test the Cheetah outside the lab as soon as possible. The previous record was 13.1 m.p.h., set at M.I.T. in 1989. Boston Dynamics, based in Waltham, Mass., has designed a range of mobile robots with financing from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Previous designs, like BigDog, have been machines intended to follow walking soldiers in the field with loads of up to 1,000 pounds. The company said that while Cheetah was a research project, both military and civilian applications were possible, including emergency rescue and the navigation of rugged terrain.

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