The Boston Dynamics robot is extending its legs to return to both a fully stable state and its optimal “home” or resting position state. As to the question of

The Boston Dynamics robot is extending its legs to return to both a fully stable state and its optimal “home” or resting position state. As to the question of whether the robot is following a ‘predefined “script”’ (implying, I think, that the developers might have “cheated”) if it were easy to make a “predefined script” that let a robot do this kind of thing, it would have been done years ago. Stability of complex dynamical systems is an incredibly hard problem, and without real active stability control there’s no way to get a thousand pound robot to balance like this. There’s no cheating involved, they simply did the hard things and made them look easy.