Ostrich-inspired two legged robot Cassie crosses 5km running milestone

Cassie, the ostrich-inspired bipedal robot has crossed a new milestone by traversing a distance of 5 kilometres in an outdoor environment in under an hour, untethered and on a single battery charge. According to its inventors, including robotics professor Jonathan Hurst from Oregon State University (OSU) in the US, Cassie is the first two-legged robot to use machine learning to control a running gait on outdoor terrain. One of the biggest challenges in designing bipedal robots, the researchers explained, is because running requires dynamic balancing – the ability to maintain balance while switching positions or otherwise being in motion. In the case of Cassie, whose knees bend like an ostrich's, they said the robot taught itself to run using a machine learning algorithm that helped it make infinite subtle adjustments to stay upright while moving. "The Dynamic Robotics Laboratory students in the OSU College of Engineering combined expertise from biomechanics and existing robot control approaches with new machine learning tools," Mr Hurst said in a statement.