Agility Robotics may be a new company, but it’s made up of the folks behind the ATRIAS robots, including MARLO at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor. Cassie is the next-generation robot that’s intended to take everything that was learned from the ATRIAS project and build it into a platform that’s both more capable and more practical.
In addition to increased efficiency, Cassie has all kinds of other practical improvements over ATRIAS. It has a 3-degrees-of-freedom hip like humans do, allowing the robot to move its legs forward and backward, side to side, and also rotate them at the same time. This makes Cassie steerable in a way that ATRIAS wasn’t. It also has powered ankles, which it uses to stand in place without having to constantly move its feet the way ATRIAS does, and it has enough battery power to run some beefy on-board computers, meaning that integrated perception is now an option.
University of Michigan engineering professor Jessy Grizzle, who wrangles the ATRIAS robot named MARLO at the Dynamic Legged Locomotion Lab, is getting one of the first Cassie robots, and both he (and his students, who have the thankless job of making sure that MARLO doesn’t faceplant during their outdoor tests) are particularly excited about how durable Cassie is. “Cassie is tough,” Grizzle tells us. “It’s designed for the rough and tumble life of an experimental robot. In principle, we should not have to use a safety gantry of any kind. This will allow us to take the robot into wild places.”
The company says the initial Cassie production run is already completely sold out, but if you want one to play with, more will be available later in the summer. As far as using Cassie to deliver packages, it’s a compelling idea, and we can see the benefits: In a world where so much of our spaces are designed around bipedal mobility, a bipedal robot could become the easiest and most reliable platform to do anything practical. Cassie has some work to do before it’s ready to be hauling groceries up stairs for you, but we’re very much looking forward to watching this robot taking more steps toward robust and dynamic legged locomotion.
