A 100-metre sprint record has been broken - by a robot. The robo-runner, named Cassie, has established a Guinness World Record for the fastest distance time by a bipedal robot. Invented at the Oregon State University (OSU) College of Engineering, and produced by OSU spinout company Agility Robotics, Cassie clocked the historic time of 24.73 seconds. The feat, at OSU’s Whyte Track and Field Center, saw Cassie starting from a standing position and returning to that position after the sprint, with no falls. The 100-metre record builds on earlier achievements by the robot, including traversing 5 kilometres in 2021 in just over 53 minutes. Cassie, the first bipedal robot to use machine learning to control a running gait on outdoor terrain, completed the 5K on Oregon State’s campus untethered and on a single battery charge. Cassie was developed under the direction of Oregon State robotics professor Jonathan Hurst with a 16-month, $1 million grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. The robot has knees that bend like an ostrich’s and operates with no cameras or external sensors, essentially as if blind. Since Cassie’s introduction in 2017, in collaboration with artificial intelligence professor Alan Fern, OSU students funded by the National Science Foundation and the DARPA Machine Common Sense program have been exploring machine learning options in Oregon State’s Dynamic Robotics and AI Lab. “We have been building the understanding to achieve this world record over the past several years, running a 5K and also going up and down stairs,” said graduate student Devin Crowley, who led the Guinness effort. “Machine learning approaches have long been used for pattern recognition, such as image recognition, but generating control behaviors for robots is new and different.” The Dynamic Robotics and AI Lab melds physics with AI approaches more commonly used with data and simulation to generate novel results in robot control, Fern said. Students and researchers come from a range of backgrounds including mechanical engineering, robotics and computer science. “Cassie has been a platform for pioneering research in robot learning for locomotion,” Crowley said. “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.”
