Agility Robotics has designed a bipedal robot that can walk like a human with greater agility and control than ever before. Getting robots to walk and move more like humans will help them better traverse complex and uneven terrain and prevent them from falling over. In the long term, the revolutionized robot mobility could be used for delivering goods and also to perform search and rescue missions that are too dangerous for humans to venture. Don't Miss: Big Announcements at MCW 2017 "This technology will simply explode at some point, when we create vehicles so automated and robots so efficient that deliveries and shipments are almost free,” said Jonathan Hurst, a chief technology officer at Agility Robotics, a spin-off of Oregon State University. “This robot capability will free people from weekend shopping chores, reduce energy use, and give consumers more time to do the things they want to do. It effectively brings efficient automated logistics from state-of-the-art warehouses out and into the rest of the world.” Though the new two-legged robot dubbed Cassie is intended to walk like a human, its crouched legs look more like that of an ostrich. Creators say that they weren’t trying to duplicate the appearance of an animal, just the techniques that allowed the robot to move more freely and efficiently than other bipedal robots. There are many bipedal robots out there that can replicate the walking of human but they need a huge amount of energy to do that and they tend to be very slow in their movement. Agility Robotics researchers claim that other robots are not even close to Cassie as far as being able to dynamically walk around. To build the robot, researchers extensively studied human-scale bipedal robots ATRIAS. Cassie’s design is actually based on the legged locomotion used by ATRIAS robots “ATRIAS was the first machine to demonstrate human-like gait dynamics and implement spring-mass walking (reproducing the ground reaction forces and center-of-mass motion of human walking), but it was not a practical machine for any use other than science demonstration.” Hurst told IEEE Spectrum. “After some analysis, we developed the specific leg configuration of Cassie. This allows the motor to be smaller and the robot to be far more efficient than even ATRIAS was.” To increase robot's efficiency, researchers had attached a 3-degrees-of-freedom hip to it, which allows the robot to move its legs forward and backward, side to side, and also rotate them at the same time. Built with $1 million grant from Advanced Research Projects Agency of the U.S. Department of Defense, Cassie is already one of the leading innovations in the world of legged robotics.
Applied Robotics , a spin - off of Oregon State University , has designed a bipedal robot able to walk more like a human than any other robot to date . Known as Cassie , the robot has a small motor and some freedom of hip mobility , allowing it to use its legs while moving forward , backward or side - to - side . Agility Robotics claims that bipedal mobility is useful for performing search and rescue missions that are too dangerous for humans , and predicts that legged robots can be used to deliver parcels as part of automated logistics systems .