Engineers and robotics specialists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) drew inspiration for their latest design from a familiar four-legged friend: the common house cat.

Researchers are calling their creation the "cheetah-cub robot" and hope the robocat, which employs novel locomotion technology in its feline-like legs, will encourage further research in biomechanics. In the future, similarly ambulatory robots could be used in search and rescue missions and for exploration, the EPFL reports.

Their feline-like robot is said to be able to run faster than all other known robots similar in size, capable of covering up to seven times its body length in one second.

While it lacks a head, fur and the general cuteness of a house cat, the robocat's legs are a faithful reproduction of a feline's. Each leg has three segments with proportions identical to a cat, with springs used to replace tendons and small motorized actuators that can replicate movement as a substitute for actual muscles.

"This morphology gives the robot the mechanical properties from which cats benefit, that's to say a marked running ability and elasticity in the right spots, to ensure stability," said Alexander Sprowitz, a scientist involved with the creation of the robocat at EPFL's Biorobotics Laboratory. "The robot is thus naturally more autonomous."

While the robocat lacks the agility of a real feline, it reportedly has excellent auto-stabilization features that enable it to run at full speed and not trip over itself, even if it hits a bump in the road.

The robot is still in the experimental stages and more prototypes are likely to come as the materials the scientists used to build the robocat are inexpensive and readily available, according to the EPFL.

"Studying and using the principles of the animal kingdom to develop new solutions for use in robots is the essence of our research," Auke Ijspeert, the director of the Biorobotics Laboratory, said in a statement. Gaining design inspiration from a cat was a logical next step, he said, after his lab's work on robots inspired by the salamander and the lamprey.