MIT’s robot army trains together in a video that will mess you up

What’s more disconcerting than watching MIT’s dog-like Mini Cheetah robot cavorting around? Nine of them doing it in unison.

We’ve had concerns about MIT’s robots for some time now, but a new video from the school’s biomimetic robotics lab opens into new levels of terror. After a playful bit of robot soccer, the nine Mini Cheetahs gather together like a military unit and start playing a dystopian version of “Simon Says.”

The synchronized stretches and backflips are creepy enough, but the leaf piles will really mess up your day. This is what the eventual, clearly inevitable robot uprising will look like right in the moment it happens.

NOPE.

The Mini Cheetah is a slimmed down version of the Cheetah 3, a 90-pound, four-legged machine that’s roughly the size of a “full-grown labrador.” As Mashable reported back in July 2018, the Cheetah 3 is built to operate primarily by touch, allowing it to perform tasks in lightless environments.

It’s the perfect kind of robot for investigating locations that are hazardous to humans. But what happens when it decides not to help anymore? We end up in a world that looks like a more modern take of the Tom Selleck/Kirstie Alley classic, Runaway.

Predictably, the people of Twitter (understandably) freaked out and turned the whole thing into a reaction-filled Moment.