Oregon, US: The Oregon State University in the United States of America has developed a robot which has broken the Guinness World Record for robots by running 100 meters on two legs in half a minute.
A robot, named Cassie, built by OSU spinoff company Agility Robotics broke the Guinness World Record for the fastest bipedal robot, when it ran 100 meters in 24.73 seconds on a track at the University’s White Track and Field Center, an engineer at the Oregon State University College of Engineering stated.
Cassie, created in 2017, ran 5 kilometers around campus last year in 53 minutes on a single battery charge. Casey is the first bipedal robot to use machine learning to control running on outdoor terrain.
The robot has bendable knees and works ‘like a blind man’ without using cameras or external sensors. Part of the challenge was to program Cassie to start from a free-standing position, run, and then return to the free-standing position without falling.
“Completing a 5K was about reliability and endurance, which left open the question of, how fast can Cassie run? That led the research team to shift its focus to speed,” graduate student, Devin Crowley remarked.
“Cassie can perform a spectrum of different gaits but as we specialized it for speed we began to wonder, which gaits are most efficient at each speed? This led to Cassie’s first optimized running gait and resulted in behavior that was strikingly similar to human biomechanics,” Crowely added.
The experiment was developed by OSU robotics professor Jonathan Hurst and artificial intelligence professor Alan Fern with a 16 month, $1million grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
Even with all the advancements, robots are still trailing humans in pure speed with Usain Bolt’s world record for 100 meter sprint set at 9.58 seconds still remaining untouched.