ICub

Open source robotics humanoid robot testbed

iCub is a one meter tall open source robotics humanoid robot testbed for research into human cognition and artificial intelligence. It was designed by the RobotCub Consortium of several European universities, built by Italian Institute of Technology, and is now supported by other projects such as ITALK. The robot is open source, with the hardware design, software and documentation all released under the GPL license. The name is a partial acronym, cub standing for Cognitive Universal Body. Initial funding for the project was €8.5 million from Unit E5 – Cognitive Systems and Robotics – of the European Commission's Seventh Framework Programme, and this ran for 65 months from 1 September 2004 until 31 January 2010. The motivation behind the strongly humanoid design is the embodied cognition hypothesis, that human like manipulation plays a vital role in the development of human cognition. A baby learns many cognitive skills by interacting with its environment and other humans using its limbs and senses, and consequently its internal model of the world is largely determined by the form of the human body. The robot was designed to test this hypothesis by allowing cognitive learning scenarios to be acted out by an accurate reproduction of the perceptual system, and an articulation of a small child so that it could interact with the world in the same way that such a child does. The robot was not designed for autonomous operation, and is consequently not equipped with onboard batteries or processors required for this —instead an umbilical cable provides power and a network connection. and lighter, more robust legs with greater joint angles and which permit walking rather than just crawling.

These robots were built by Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) in Genoa and are used by a small but lively community of scientists that use the iCub to study embodied cognition in artificial systems. There are about thirty iCubs in various laboratories mainly in the European Union but also one in the United States. The robots are constructed by IIT and cost about €250,000 each depending upon the version. Most of the financial support comes from the European Commission's Unit E5 or the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) via the recently created iCub Facility department. The development and construction of iCub at IIT is part of an independent documentary film called Plug & Pray which was released in 2010.