Meet the super robots that are about to lap the world's fastest humans.

You probably picture robots as clodhoppers: ponderous, clunky, even doddery droids that need caffeine, badly.

But robots are on the brink of making giant strides. Just ask Columbia University engineering professor Hod Lipson, who writes in Nature that “young animals gallop across fields, climb trees, and immediately find their feet with grace after they fall”—and robots are set to follow suit.

Lipson is right. A new breed of speedy robots promises to eventually outdo the runners at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Notable cybernetic contenders include MIT’s dominant Cheetah, Boston Dynamics’ Petman and Handle, Michigan Robotics’ MABEL, and—further afield in South Africa—the University of Cape Town’s Baleka.

Plus, that efficiency-geared Florida University powerhouse, the Institute for Human & Machine Cognition (IHMC), fields a smart, sensor-free biped plainly

called Planar Elliptical Runner (PER). The Verge frames PER as “all mechanics,” meaning less technical cunning is needed to keep it upright

A single motor at PER’s core drives its legs in an elliptical or oval motion that makes for inherent stability, so it avoids falling forward or backward. Torsion springs generate added power in PER’s legs, making it still more steady. The paragon of dynamic geometry is unencumbered by any power-hungry, number-crunching processor that gauges steps in line with sensor data.

The slick mover does 12 miles per hour (mph) on a treadmill, which is faster than it sounds. After all, the fastest (official) marathon ever run, by Kenyan Eliud Kipchoge in Berlin in 2018, unfolded at a clip of 13 mph.

That said, IHMC pacesetter HexRunner has clocked a world-beating 32.2 miles per hour, edging the previous record of 28.3 miles per hour, held by MIT’s four-legged trailblazer, Cheetah, which riffs on the cat that can hit 69.5 mph in just three seconds, aided by the length of its legs, spine, and tail that lets it balance, National Geographic says.

Radically different in looks from MIT’s mechanical cat, the wheel-based HexRunner is almost 6 feet tall. Armed with two sets of three spokes set either side of a hub, it rolls along like tumbleweed by spinning both, so whenever one of its six feet leaves the ground, another touches down.

Just like PER, Big Hex is all about sharp design. In this promotional clip, IHMC Senior Research Scientist Jerry Pratt says his team is striving to achieve fast, graceful locomotion marred by minimal feedback, amid general plodding progress.

“With most running and walking robots we have a lot of sensors, and about a thousand times a second we read what the sensors are doing,” Pratt says in the video. “We do a lot of computation to figure out what the actuators should be doing.”

Then, he adds, the actuators that turn energy into motion must be given just the right pulse of power. “And we have to do that really quickly or the robot will fall down."