Cassie, a robot developed by Oregon State University researchers, is essentially just a pair of sophisticated mechanical legs. But those legs just set a Guinness World Record for the fastest 100-meter dash run by a bipedal robot. Running – even quickly – might seem an easy task for a human, but it takes considerably more effort to teach a machine to do so without tripping or veering off course.

Alan Fern is a professor of computer science and artificial intelligence at Oregon State University and the College of Engineering’s executive director of artificial intelligence programs. He explains what Cassie’s accomplishments mean for machine learning and the future of robotics.