The Cognitive Humanoids Laboratory relies also on mechanical, electronic and informatics support both internally and through the shared resources of the RBCS department. In particular, our technical infrastructure helps in developing new mechanical and electronic components, debugging existing solutions, and to maintain our robots and computational infrastructure. Mechanical development is carried out together with the mechanical workshop facility, electronics is developed in collaboration with the electronics design laboratory and the computer network is maintained together with the RBCS system administration group. We also developed the software and firmware infrastructure of the iCub (see for example yarp).

The current design focus on the development of a new release of the iCub called tentatively “v2” which includes force/torque control, a skin, and several mechanical improvements including bipedal walking capabilities (together with the advanced robotics department).

People: Lorenzo Natale, Francesco Nori, Alessandro Bruchi, Matteo Tamboli
Related project: RobotCub

One of the blade servers controlling the iCub robot							iCub wiring in the Electronic Lab
Mechanical workshop facility							Electronics design laboratory

References:

 P. Fitzpatrick, G. Metta, L. Natale. Towards Long-Lived Robot Genes. In Journal of Robotics and Autonomous Systems Special Issue on Humanoid Technologies. Vol. 56 (2008) 1–3.

 G. Metta, G. Sandini, D. Vernon, L. Natale, F. Nori. The iCub humanoid robot: an open platform for research in embodied cognition. In PerMIS: Performance Metrics for Intelligent Systems Workshop. Aug 19-21, 2008, Washington DC – USA.

 G. Sandini, G. Metta, D. Vernon. The iCub Cognitive Humanoid Robot: An Open-System Research Platform for Enactive Cognition.In 50 Years of Artificial Intelligence. Essays Dedicated to the 50th Anniversary of Artificial Intelligence Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science , Vol. 4850, Lungarella, M.; Iida, F.; Bongard, J.; Pfeifer, R. (Eds.) , Springer-Verlag. 2007.