Earlier last week, Boston Dynamics has just created what they call the WildCat. Though it’s about as cuddly as a vacuum cleaner, the new four-legged robot has just made a step forward for robot design.

Boston Dynamics, an engineering company, had been working on the design of WildCat over the last year. Marc Raibert, a former MIT and Carnagie Mellon university professor who founded Boston Dynamics, said this design was a next-generation version of the company’s previous robot, Cheetah.

Both Cheetah and WildCat move on four legs and at faster speeds than most any other robot out there. Cheetah is much faster than WildCat, topping out at a speed of 29.3 mph against WildCat’s 16 mph. However, WildCat does deserve kudos, for it has reached that speed without the help of any tethers.

Cheetah needs a boom-like device to hold it upright and cannot hold its own power source. WildCat, meanwhile, is one of the first robots designed that can carry its own power supply and support itself.

WildCat has two different gaits: “bound” and “gallop.” In the video, the robot performs both gaits. Watching, you almost forget for a moment that you are looking at robot and not some ugly, headless horse as it prances around in the gallop mode.

Boston Dynamics is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, an agency of the U.S. Department of Defense that is responsible for the development of new technologies for military use. The version in the video is a very early stage of WildCat’s development, with the eventual goal being that it will be able to move at speeds of up to 50 mph on all types of terrain.

Raipert believes Wildcat will eventually be able to help humans with firefighting efforts, rescue scenarios, disaster recovery and military operations. The main purpose of the Maximum Mobility and Manipulation (M3) program is only to investigate how humans can create robots that are more flexible and fluid than the current designs are.Let’s just hope military robots remain on the sidelines and not the forefront of armed operations.

WildCat will join the family of robots created by Boston Dynamics and DARPA. The other robots are the previously mentioned Cheetah, the human-type robot Atlas, and the dog-like robot BigDog. BigDog’s purpose is as the pack mule while Atlas is the emergency-response unit designed to go into combat or disaster situations to retrieve victims.