It’s just like a cheetah—except you can move it with your X-box controller.

MIT’s new robot is called the cheetah. Like a real cheetah, it weighs about 70 pounds. It can run more than 10 miles per hour. That’s not a lot for a cheetah. They run almost 60 miles per hour. But it’s a lot for a robot powered by batteries! In the middle of its run, the robot can jump 16 inches into the air, land, and start running again. For all this it uses less power than a microwave.

The real cheetah is an incredible creation. Only God could have made it. Scientists had to put five years of work into a metal imitation. To get the machine to run like a cheetah, calculations had to be perfect. How long should each leg spend on the ground during running? How much force should land on each foot?

But researchers learned a lot in those five years of experiments. If they use what they learned, they might be able to make vehicles travel like animals. Imagine your car climbing like a mountain goat or whizzing over rough places like a cheetah! Do you think it will ever happen?