Walking robot “Cassie†can do your house chores

The rapidly expanding robotics program in the College of Engineering at Oregon State University has spun off one of its first businesses, a company focused on legged locomotion that may revolutionise robot mobility and enable robots to go anywhere people can go.

The Oregon-based firm Agility Robotics has several of its first customers and will be licensing some technologies first developed at the university. Currently, they are offering a a bipedal robot named “Cassie” which can stand, steer and take a pretty good fall without breaking, the company officials said.

Cassie was built with a 16-month and a 1$ million grant from the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the US Department of Defense.

Company officials say they plan to do all initial production in Oregon and will focus their business on the commercial applications of legged robots.

The firm believes that a leading application for this type of mobility is package delivery. In the long term, advanced mobility will enable shipping so automated and inexpensive that its costs becomes inconsequential, opening vast new possibilities in retail trade while lowering costs for manufacturing and production.

“This technology will simply explode at some point, when we create vehicles so automated and robots so efficient that deliveries and shipments are almost free,” said Jonathan Hurst, an associate professor of robotics in the OSU College of Engineering, chief technology officer at Agility Robotics and an international leader in the development of legged locomotion.

Last month, OSU officials also announced that the university will be a founding academic partner in the newest Manufacturing USA Institute, the Advance Robotics Manufacturing Innovation Hub. This broad program with 14 institutes is a $3 billion federal and private company initiative designed to enhance US competitiveness in advanced manufacturing.