The iCub humanoid robot

TLDR

The iCub is a 104‑cm tall, child‑sized humanoid robot for embodied cognition research, distributed under GPL/FDL licenses with its full design available online, while its scientific objectives and philosophical underpinnings are described elsewhere. The paper focuses on describing the iCub’s hardware and software systems, highlighting its ability to crawl on all fours and sit to manipulate objects. The iCub’s hands are engineered to enable sophisticated manipulation skills.

Abstract

We report about the iCub, a humanoid robot for research in embodied cognition. At 104 cm tall, the iCub has the size of a three and half year old child. It will be able to crawl on all fours and sit up to manipulate objects. Its hands have been designed to support sophisticate manipulation skills. The iCub is distributed as Open Source following the GPL/FDL licenses. The entire design is available for download from the project homepage and repository (http://www.robotcub.org). In the following, we will concentrate on the description of the hardware and software systems. The scientific objectives of the project and its philosophical underpinning are described extensively elsewhere [1].