Cassie the robot broke a Guinness World Record for the 100-meter dash. Oregon State University's rwo-legged 'Cassie' clocked in at 24.73 seconds, making it the fastest robot on record.                                                                                                                                                             It may still trail the fastest human on the planet, but Cassie proved it's no slouch, either. Earlier this week, Oregon State University's College of Engineering and its spinout company 'Agility Robotics', released a video shot earlier this year showcasing their bipedal robot as it set a new Guinness World Record for the fastest 100 meter dash undertaken by a machin: 24.73 seconds.                                                                                                                   Last year, Cassie pulled off another achievement when it power-walked a 5K in just over 53 minutes, displaying the team's advancements in reliability and durability within mobile robotics. "This may be the first bipedal robot to learn to run, but it won't be the last," OSU robotics professor Johnathan Hurst said in a press statement. "I think progress is going to accelerate from here."                                                                                                                                                                                           Using a computing technique known as 'parallelization' in which a program simultaneously runs multiple calculations and simulations, Cassie fit the equivalent of an entire year's worth of machine learning into a single week. "Cassie can perform a spectrum of different gaits but as we specialized it for speed we began to wonder, which gaites are most efficient at each speed? Devin Crowley, a graduate student and project collaborator, said in a statement.                                                                                                                             Despite the prototype's decidedly ostrich-legged appearance, the learning "led to Cassie's first optimized running gaite and resulted in behavior that is strikingly similar to human biometrics." At 9.58 seconds, our species' record is still less than half of Usan Bolt's , and as The Verge notes, Cassie is far from the world's fastest robot - Boston Dynamics' quadrupedal 'WildCat' can max out at 19 mph, while MIT's four-legged 'Mini Cheetah' reached around 9 mph, although there doesn't appear to be any indications either could travel as long as Cassie. Still, it's an impressive new milestone in robotic mobility.