Cassie 100m Dash

When I was a member of the Oregon State Dynamic Robotics Lab, our core focus was to develop agile, robust, and high performing control methods for bipedal locomotion. Jonathan Hurst has the idea that setting a specific goal would be a great motivating factor to push the limits of our methods and our Cassie robot. The most visible and successful was the 100 meter dash.

Masters student Devin Crowley lead the project including performing the policy training and coordination the organizational effort with Guinness. Jeremy Dao, Helei Duan, and I collaborated and advised on all aspects of the effort.

We actually created a new record for this category which has some interesting rules to avoid being gamed. Specifically, the record requires that the robot “must start in a standing pose and return to that pose after crossing the finish line. It cannot simply run 100 metres and crash.” This might feel excessive compared to the minimal rules of just running across a line, but this is necessary to ensure that the record covers truly versatile bipedal robots.

One thing that this project really highlighted to me was how tough Cassie is, and how important that is. The fall below happened on an attempt right before the record attempt. Cassie simply needed to be picked up and reenabled and it worked just fine. Now I’m not saying it’s indestructible, believe me we broke that robot in just about every what imaginable.