L. Natale(1), F.Nori(2), N. Tsagarakis(3), G. Metta(1)
(1) iCub Facility
(2) Robotics, Brain and Cognitive Sciences
(3)Advanced Robotics Departments
Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT), Via Morego, 30 - 16163 Genoa, Italy.
NEW : Workshop photos
Workshop program 
Background
The iCub is a humanoid robot shaped as a four years old child. It is available as an open system platform following the GPL license. The iCub was originally designed by a consortium of 11 partners guided by the Italian Institute of Technology, with background ranging from engineering to neurophysiology and developmental psychology, within the RobotCub Integrated Project funded by European Commission through its Cognitive Systems and Robotics Unit. The iCub can crawl on all fours and sit up. Its hands allow dexterous manipulation and its head and eyes are fully articulated. It has visual, vestibular, auditory, and tactile sensory capabilities. In the past few years the community of researchers working on the iCub grew at a constant pace. Today there are more than 25 iCub platforms available worldwide. Simultaneously the platform evolved significantly in terms of its sensors and actuators. Thanks to the recent improvements the iCub is now equipped with: whole-body distributed tactile and force/torque sensing, series elastic actuators for compliant walking experiments (the COMAN actuators) and movable head with microphones, speaker, actuated eyes, eyelids and lips for speech and human-robot interaction studies. The key advantage of the iCub is that it is an integrated platform that allows the study of complex tasks that require speech and auditory perception, vision as well as proper coordination and integration of sensory data and control. We believe that this, more than ever, requires that researchers with different expertise join forces and start working together. Having platforms with compatible software and hardware is clearly a unique opportunity for collaboration. This workshop is the third in a series happening approximately every two years and, in particular, it will present a cohesive description of the iCub-related activities ranging from software development, control, vision, cognition and hardware, sensors and so forth.
Objectives
This workshop has two goals. The first goal is to bring together researchers working on the iCub humanoid robots and to present a complete overview of their recent activities. In particular we welcome contributions that demonstrate complex tasks that involve integration and coordination of several sensory modalities and whole-body control. The second goal is to foster collaboration among researchers that are working on different disciplines to advance the state of the art in humanoid robotics. In addition, the workshop will serve as a venue to start the preparation of a special issue for a prestigious journal. To conclude, with this 10th birthday workshop we aim at:
- Demonstrating the current development of the iCub platform;
- Providing an overview of the research on the iCub platform;
- Giving the opportunity of demonstrating and discussing recent results of integration activities;
- Advancing the state of the art in humanoid robotics by fostering collaboration among researchers working on different areas of robotics as e.g. speech, machine learning, vision, manipulation, locomotion, and whole-body control.
