Robotics companies are increasingly surprising us with their advances, like Cassie. The industry has presented from devices capable of making a hamburger to others that simulate birds, but this time it is time to talk about a different creation.

It is Cassie, a bipedal robot that managed to run 5 km in a single race. It took 53 minutes and 3 seconds, and while that time does not qualify as a human record-breaker, it is impressive what this robot did in technological terms.

Unlike others that, for example, use wheels to get around, the Cassie robot has two legs and no anchoring system. The people behind it are the Dynamics Robotics Laboratory team at Oregon State University; they unveiled the robot in 2017 and since then students and professors have been working to give it autonomy.

Previously, the team was able to train Cassie in a simulator to run up and down a flight of stairs without the use of cameras or a lidar device, and now through a reinforcement learning algorithm they have trained it to run. According to the team, Cassie has been teaching itself through the technique that gave it the ability to stand upright and unanchored to keep its balance while running. In fact, the robot had to learn to make infinite subtle adjustments to achieve the feat. 

The race itself was not without its problems either. It took the team around 6 minutes to fix technical problems. In addition, Cassie had a crash due to computer overheating and another after executing a turn too fast. But she still managed to run 5 km around the campus.

“Cassie is an efficient robot because of how it has been designed and built. We were really able to push the limits of the hardware and show what it can do,” said student Jeremy Dao.

According to TechCrunch, Cassie has served as the basis for Agility Robotics‘ Digit delivery robot, but has now proven to be a solid platform for exploring the bipedal area.

Source: Digitaltrends ES