By Lorenzo Natale  

Abstract 

In this talk I will describe, iCub a humanoid robot for research in embodied cognition. The iCub is a 53 degrees-of-freedom humanoid robot, about the size of a three and half year old child (104cm tall). It will be able to crawl on all fours and sit up to manipulate objects. The hands of iCub have been designed to support sophisticate manipulation skills. The iCub is distributed as Open Source following the GPL/FDL licenses. The entire design and software are available for download from the project homepage and repository (http://www.robotcub.org). In this talk I will concentrate on the description of the hardware and software systems.

Lorenzo Natale is team leader at the Italian Institute of Technology. He received a MS degree in Electronic Engineering in 2000 and PhD in Robotics from the Universtity of Genoa. During his MSc and Ph.D. he worked in the Laboratory for Integrated Advanced Robotics (LIRA-Lab), at the University of Genoa. Between 2005 and 2006 he was Postdoctoral researcher at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, working in the Humanoid Robotics Group. His research focuses on developmental robotics, sensorimotor learning and perception in artificial and biological systems. He is also interested in software development and integration.