The two-legged robot Cassie managed to walk five kilometers on a single battery charge, said American engineers from the University of Oregon and the company Agility Robotics. When walking around the stadium, he spent a little less than 44 minutes and never fell, and when driving around the university campus, he overcame this distance in 53 minutes, in the process he fell twice, because of which the engineers had to return him to normal mode.
In recent years, developers of walking robots, for example, Atlas, have repeatedly shown impressive skills that not all people can do, let alone robots. Against this background, the basic skills of these robots can be perceived as a long-solved task, but six years ago at the competitions of bipedal robots held by DARPA, many of them fell when walking slowly or even standing on their feet:
Since many developers, including Agility Robotics itself, offer delivery as one of the scenarios for using bipedal robots, it is necessary to hone their walking skills as much as possible and equip them with a sufficiently capacious energy source. Engineers from the Laboratory of Dynamic Robotics at the University of Oregon and the company Agility Robotics demonstrated the capabilities of the two — legged robot Cassie using a popular distance for running and sports walking-five thousand meters.
First, the engineers conducted the test under ideal conditions: the robot under the control of the operator walked along an eight-shaped trajectory, being in a sports stadium with a flat terrain. In total, the robot has passed 20 such eights, the total length of which is just five kilometers. The robot covered five kilometers in 43 minutes and 59 seconds with an average speed of 1.89 meters per second (6.8 kilometers per hour), although on one of the laps the speed reached 2.15 meters per second (7.74 kilometers per hour).
In the second test, engineers with a robot went for a walk around the university to test the ability to walk along real streets with their irregularities. This time, the robot spent 53 minutes and three seconds, but not because of the lower speed, but because of two falls. The first time the robot failed due to overheating of the computing module, and the second time it fell due to too high speed in a turn. It took the engineers 6.5 minutes to fix the problems, so without taking into account the stops, the time to overcome five kilometers on the street took about 46 and a half minutes.
Two years ago, Agility Robotics made a full-fledged humanoid robot based on Cassie, equipping its legs with a body and arms. And in 2020, it began selling it.
Grigory Kopiev