It's rare that advanced humanoid robots make it to Manchester, so when child-sized robot iCub was in town yesterday I made sure to get a place at the evening talk. And a fascinating session it was too, as project leader Professor Darwin Caldwell ran through the robot's development and capabilities.
He revealed that they'd given it a cartoon-ish face to avoid the dreaded uncanny valley effect (though they'd forgotten to bring the face with them); that there are around 20 iCubs in existence; that his view is that the domestic robot will appear between 2020 and 2030 (nice tie in with Exilium then) and that European robotics has the edge on the Japanese in a few areas, such as mechanics and cognition. The robot is impressive and reminded me of another child robot, the CB2, developed in Osaka.
Professor Caldwell added that many technicians working on the Japanese robots don't actually know how the whole device works, just their part of it so it was interesting to discover that iCub is an open source project - anyone anywhere can contribute to it and if you've a spare £200K to build your own iCub, you can download the software into your home version and it will crawl around for you.
Everything iCub is here and there is video footage at the BBC news site.
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