iCub

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A child-sized open-source humanoid robot from Italy's IIT, built for embodied-cognition research.

iCub grew out of the EU-funded RobotCub project, which began in 2004 and was led by the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT). Its research goal is embodied cognition — the idea that intelligence may only develop through a body interacting with its environment. iCub is about 104 cm tall and 22 kg, roughly the size of a small child, with 53 degrees of freedom across its body; a large share of them are concentrated in the hands, eyes, and head and neck, which makes it well suited to studying grasping and visual attention. Both the hardware design and the software (built on the YARP middleware) are released under open licenses such as the GPL, and more than 50 research institutions worldwide use it. IIT later built a taller version, iCub3, designed for remote-avatar teleoperation.

ExampleResearchers let iCub handle a toy repeatedly, the way an infant would, to see whether it can learn the concept of an object purely through its own actions.

Also called: iCub3, IIT iCub
Related: Humanoid Robot · Embodied Cognition · Small-size Humanoid Robot · Open-Source Hardware (OSHW) · SoftBank Robotics NAO
Sources: The iCub humanoid robot: an open platform for research in embodied cognition
Developing Advanced Control Software for the iCub Humanoid Robot - MathWorks