Oregon State University

Oregon State University, a public university in Corvallis founded in 1868, matters to humanoids through one lab. Jonathan Hurst arrived in 2008 as its first robotics professor and built the Dynamic Robotics Laboratory around one idea: legs should behave like springs and masses, as birds' legs do, not as stiff position-controlled joints.

The lab's first full biped was ATRIAS, whose name stands for Assume The Robot Is A Sphere. Modelled on ground birds and meant to be the fastest biped in the world, it is described by the university as the first robot to reproduce the dynamics of human walking. It walked outdoors at about 3 mph with handlers in April 2015 and appeared at the DARPA Robotics Challenge finals that June. Its successor Cassie, a pair of legs with no upper body, was developed under a 16-month, USD 1 million DARPA grant. In 2021 Cassie ran 5 km outdoors in just over 53 minutes on a reinforcement-learned controller, with two falls, and in 2022 set a Guinness record for the 100 m by a bipedal robot.

Hurst, Damion Shelton and Mikhail Jones founded Agility Robotics as a spin-off to sell Cassie and later build Digit. The lab continues on learned locomotion with Cassie hardware; commercial work moved to the company. OSU itself sells no robots.