We already have treaded robots for investigating rubble and disaster areas, most of which would be too unstable for parkour anyway.
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Humans are bad enough at walking, and they’ve got tons of processing power. Why people focus on bipedal robots is mystifying. There are myriad designs that are way more practical.
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2019 jumps a lot better than Gordon Freeman.
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I’ll give them this: there’s definitely a lot of potential for those things in the entertainment industry. Animatronic characters in amusement parks, smart toys, Westworld-style sexbots, etc.
Other than that there isn’t any particular reason to design a functional robot in the form of a human being.
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These will probably be used by the armed forces, and although being bipedal might not be the most efficient design, they’ll look more imposing in war if they look human.
Pedantry alert!
From the post:
On the left, a tethered robot from 2009 hobbles on a treadmill. On the right, an untethered 2019 version agiley bounds over a pyramid of crates.
agiley agilely 
This is where I ask if the developers watched I, Robot. Where are the short dishwashing robots equipped with a very large and easily-accessible OFF switch? 
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Seems like yesterday that Cyberdyne released the herky-jerky T800. Look how far we’ve come!
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How about going into a burning building to rescue (or recover) victims? No joke: a former co-worker’s husband died doing just that. Smoke, debris, disorientation. A robot that has IR vision, GPS orientation, and no need to breathe? Yeah, I’ll pay for the FD to have those.
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Still no reason to think a bipedal humanoid robot would be better at the task than any other design. A treaded robot would be able to enter a burning building and drag out human bodies at least as well as parkour-bot here, and would be less likely to destabilize the structure with all that jumping around.
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Make sure we never program them to know what that switch does otherwise the metal bastards will keep turning each other on again.
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Even 4 legs would be better.
4 robot legs good, 2 robot legs bad.
I’m getting a faint feeling this is a bad idea…
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Don’t give the designers any more ideas!! 
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“…there isn’t any particular reason to design a functional robot in the form of a human being.”
Sex?
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The march continues.
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Bipedal robots just distract the silly humans while they fine-tune the much more horrific models.
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So, you’re saying all robots are equal but some are more equal than others?
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Uh, IG-11 is a bad example of a sentient robot: he cares only about accomplishing the mission and has no ethics, no Asimovian restrictions.
IG-11 was a split-second away from killing my Baby Yoda!
Neither does a Roomba. That’s why you don’t have to feel bad about throwing them in the e-waste bin at the end of their useful life cycle.
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