Optimizing Bipedal Locomotion for The 100m Dash With Comparison to Human Running
This addresses the problem of enabling efficient and fast bipedal robot running for real-world tasks, representing an incremental advancement in robotics.
The paper tackled optimizing running gaits for the bipedal robot Cassie to achieve high-speed locomotion, resulting in a Guinness World Record for the fastest 100m dash by a bipedal robot.
In this paper, we explore the space of running gaits for the bipedal robot Cassie. Our first contribution is to present an approach for optimizing gait efficiency across a spectrum of speeds with the aim of enabling extremely high-speed running on hardware. This raises the question of how the resulting gaits compare to human running mechanics, which are known to be highly efficient in comparison to quadrupeds. Our second contribution is to conduct this comparison based on established human biomechanical studies. We find that despite morphological differences between Cassie and humans, key properties of the gaits are highly similar across a wide range of speeds. Finally, our third contribution is to integrate the optimized running gaits into a full controller that satisfies the rules of the real-world task of the 100m dash, including starting and stopping from a standing position. We demonstrate this controller on hardware to establish the Guinness World Record for Fastest 100m by a Bipedal Robot.