Machine learning helped MIT's cheetah robot break its own speed record

The fleet-footed quadruped robot called Mini Cheetah… well, doesn't move like anything in the animal kingdom. A cross between a scramble and a scamper, its gait is desperately chaotic and comically ungraceful. In fact, its particular style is dubbed "gait-free." And this brandless bound is what makes it fast. A team of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) created a computer algorithm that spurs this artificially intelligent robot to maximize its speed, thereby breaking its own sprint records.