Robot Breaks Speed Record

Meet your new overlords—or their great-grandparents, anyway. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency revealed a new robot, called “Cheetah,” capable of running 18mph, a record for a machine with legs. “It’s the first time we’ve had a robot that gallops,” said the president of Boston Dynamics, who is working with DARPA to create robots that can outrun and evade humans on foot. The previous record for a legged robot was 13.1mph, set by a bipedal robot in 1989. Boston Dynamics is also working on a humanoid robot called Atlas and a doglike robot named BigDog.