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Robots that can be physically reconfigured to do lots of different things are, in theory, a great way to maximize versatility while saving time and effort. Okay, yeah, that may not sound super exciting, but it means you can teach a dodecapod robot to transition into a septapod robot that can carry stuff with two arms while using a third to point a camera. Programmed in advance, that is, which is fine, except that as robots get more modular and easier to physically reconfigure, it becomes more and more useful to have a generalized system that can dynamically generate gaits (and transitions between gaits) on the fly no matter what the leg configuration of your robot happens to be. The researchers are planning on extending their method to include dynamic gaits, which means things like (we hope) running and jumping, and they're also going to generalize to other morphologies like bipeds and tripeds.