iCub Robot
An iCub is a 1 metre high humanoid robot testbed for research into human cognition and artificial intelligence.
It was designed by the RobotCub Consortium, of several European universities and is now supported by other projects such as ITALK. The robot isopen-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 six years from 1 September 2004 until 1 September 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 articulation of a small child so that it could interact with the world in the same way that such a child does.
Capabilities of iCub:-
The iCub has been demonstrated with capabilities to successfully perform the following tasks, among others:
- crawling, using visual guidance with optic marker on the floor
- archery, shooting arrows with a bow and learning to hit the center of the target.
- facial expressions, allowing the iCub to express emotions
- force control, exploiting proximal force/torque sensors
- grasping small objects, such as balls, plastic bottles, etc.
There are about twenty iCubs in various laboratories mainly in Europe but also one in the USA and one in Turkey. These were built by the RobotCub partners or other projects and form a small but lively community of scientists that use the iCub to study embodied cognition in artificial systems.