Cassie is a bipedal robot under development in the Dynamic Robotics Laboratory. She is the next generation of the recently retired ATRIAS.
“Cassie will be three times more efficient and three times lighter than ATRIAS,” said Patrick Clary, a doctoral student. “We’re refining and optimizing everything we learned from ATRIAS, including a new custom-built higher-efficiency cycloid transmission.”
The research team hopes that Cassie will be able to walk continuously for an hour and run a 9-minute mile. Hossein Faraji, a doctoral candidate from Iran, is looking at ways to apply the biomechanics of jumping spiders to a robot capable of leaping over obstacles by using front legs to vault into low-level, high-accuracy jumps. Sai Krishna Allani, a master’s student from Hyderabad, India, is researching ways to improve the mechanics of grasping in robotic hands.
“Humans do this very well, but with robots, grasping is not all that great yet,” Alani said. “In robotics, we have good vision and dynamics, but we need grasping — that’s very important.
