Leaps and Bounds: The Breakneck Progress of Robot Agility

When Charles Rosen, the A.I. pioneer who founded SRI International's Artificial Intelligence Center, was asked to come up with a name for the world's first general -purpose mobile robot, he thought for a moment and then said: "Well, it shakes like hell when it moves. Let's just call it Shakey." Some variation of this idea has pervaded for much of the history of modern robotics. Robots, we often assume, are clunky machines with as much grace as an atheist's Sunday lunch. Even science fiction movies have repeatedly imagined robots as ungainly creations that walk with slow, halting steps. Recently, a group of researchers from the Dynamic Robotics Laboratory at Oregon State took one of the university's Cassie robots, a pair of walking robot legs that resembles the lower extremities of an ostrich, to a sports field to try out the lab's latest "bipedal gait" algorithms.