No, your eyes aren’t deceiving you – this odd-looking sculpture is moving. Running, in fact. That’s because it’s actually a robot, well, robots.

‘Legged metamachines’, as they’re officially known, are made of spherical modules, each containing a motor, battery and computer, and a pair of arms.

On their own, each module can roll, turn and jump. But when linked together, they can walk, run and right themselves when flipped over.

They can even figure out new ways of moving should they lose one or more of their limbs – if a researcher lops one off to test the machines’ adaptability, for instance.

“They can recover easily from major injuries that would be fatal to every other robot,” is how the researchers who built the machines put it. ‘It absolutely will not stop,’ is what fans of a certain sci-fi film are probably thinking when they hear that.

The Terminator echoes don’t end there, though. The legged metamachines were made by a team of engineers at Northwestern University in Chicago, who used an AI algorithm to evolve a robot with efficient, versatile movement.

“This is survival of the fittest – accelerated by computers and made real,” is how Sam Kriegman, the project’s lead, put it. Here’s hoping that algorithm isn’t called Skynet.

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