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Ostrich-Like Robot 'Cassie' Has a Future in Package Delivery

Oregon State University has spun off one of its first businesses, Agility Robotics, focused on legged robotic locomotion and enabling robots to go anywhere people can go. A leading application for this type of mobility is package delivery. The company currently offers a bipedal robot named 'Cassie' that can stand, steer, and fall without breaking. The leg configuration of Cassie looks much like an ostrich or other ground-running bird. A 3-degrees-of-freedom hip allows the robot to move its legs forward and backward, side to side, and also rotate them at the same time. "Quite simply, robots with legs can go a lot of places that wheels cannot. This will be the key to deliveries that can be made 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, by a fleet of autonomous vans that pull up to your curb, and an onboard robot that delivers to your doorstep," says Jonathan Hurst, associate professor of robotics at OSU.

Topics:
Automation Motion Control Robotics

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    Transcript

    00:00:43 We’ve been working for a lot of years on understanding walking and running. We started with ATRIAS. ATRIAS really showed the base features that we wanted to show about legged locomotion. So Cassie is the newest bipedal robot out of our lab. We added a few motors for degrees of freedom. So that enables us to stand in place, sit down, crouch, squat. We’ve had to upgrade pretty much everything from ATRIAS to get the size down. We’ve had to build a lithium ion battery pack. We looked around to have people build it for us and the two markets for that really exist in electric vehicles and home backup power.

    00:01:30 And those are both just way too large for our applications. We did a lot of out own custom designs for Cassie because we didn’t have access to off-the-shelf components that performed as well as we could make perform ourselves. We’re doing something that no one really knows how to do yet and by doing it we’re learning what’s correct. We’re learning what the right answers are. There are a lot of robots out there that will take one step and put one step in front of the other but they take a huge amount of energy to do it or any small disturbance, these robots that are just demonstrations will fall over and fail. There’s only a few robots that are even close to Cassie as far as being able to dynamically

    00:02:19 walk around. Having only two legs is a much more complicated problem that we don’t fully understand yet as compared to four legs. You know, a biped and you can think of a two-legged table, is not going to be very stable. So there’s a lot you have to do there, you really have to move your feet around. If you think about any sort of disaster scenario where they say, “Do we have any robots that can go into this space?” The answer is always, “Not yet.”. Imagine you’ve got a fire in a building and the fire chief isn’t really sure if somebody’s still in the building.

    00:02:55 And they have to make a difficult decision about whether they’re going to send one of their firefighters in, because it’s dangerous. If you have a robot, that has the same capabilities as a person, you wouldn’t think twice about sending that robot. So that’s my guiding star, is putting this out in the world and making something actually useful.