Robot maker Boston Dynamics is no stranger to odd, vaguely unsettling robots, but its latest creation might be the most terrifying one yet.
The company this week took the wraps off the “Wildcat,” a galloping all-terrain robot capable of hitting speeds as high as 16 mph.
While the Wildcat appears to be a new creation, it’s actually a follow-up to the Boston Dynamics Cheetah, which can run an Usian Bolt-esque 29 mph. The Wlidcat, in contrast, seems to trade some of that speed for more terrain versatility, which is a good thing.
Boston Dynamics, which is also behind robots like the Atlas and BigDog, is funded in part by DARPA’s Maximum Mobility and Manipulation (M3) program, which focuses on engineering advances that “significantly improve robot capabilities through fundamentally new approaches to the engineering of better design tools, fabrication methods, and control algorithms.”
Boston Dynamics’s galloping, terrifying WildCat seems to fit that description pretty well.