Running robot sets new Guinness World Record for the 100-meter dash

The latest 100-meter dash record to be set has been achieved by Cassie, a bipedal robot created by Agility Robotics.

The university announced on September 27th that Cassie had been awarded an official Guinness World Record, having run 100 meters (328 feet) in 24.73 seconds, setting the speed record for a bipedal robot to cover the distance and doing so on Oregon State's Whyte Track and Field Center. For comparison, the human world record was set at 9.58 seconds by Usain Bolt.

Notably, Cassie is the first robot to have utilized machine learning to control its running gait while outdoors. Its knees are bent the opposite way to humans and instead resemble those of an ostrich. It lacks any cameras or external sensors and thus operates blind, exemplified as the robot strays from its lane during the run. Before setting the record, Cassie has demonstrated its ability to run 5 kilometers (3.1 miles) on a single battery charge in 53 minutes.

"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. Machine learning approaches have long been used for pattern recognition, such as image recognition, but generating control behaviors for robots is new and different," said graduate student Devin Crowley, who spearheaded the Guinness feat.

"This may be the first bipedal robot to learn to run, but it won't be the last. I believe control approaches like this are going to be a huge part of the future of robotics. The exciting part of this race is the potential. Using learned policies for robot control is a very new field, and this 100-meter dash is showing better performance than other control methods. I think progress is going to accelerate from here," said OSU robotics professor and Agility Robotics chief technology officer Jonathan Hurst.