A team of roboticists and AI specialists at the Robotics & Artificial Intelligence Lab in Korea has designed, built and successfully tested a four-legged robot that is capable of conducting high-speed parkour maneuvers. In their paper published in the journal Science Robotics, the group describes how they gave their robot a controller capable of both planning and tracking its own movements to allow it to freely traverse a range of environments.

Parkour is an obstacle course type athletic discipline that takes place in unpredictable, real-world, generally urban environments —it involves climbing walls, jumping between buildings, maneuvering around objects and running across difficult, uneven terrain. The objective is to get from one place to another without injury. To give their robot the ability to conduct parkour maneuvers, the team made one change right away—they gave it four legs.

The next thing they did was design and build a special kind of controller, one that was capable of planning the route to be taken and a tracker that told the robot where to place its feet and how to use its body to move forward safely.