iCub robot

Sheffield Robotics is home to an upper-body iCub 2.0 robot (with head, arms, hands, and torso). The robot is particularly suited to research into human cognition and development, and robot learning. The design is based on the sensorimotor capabilities of a small child, with 41 degrees of freedom and a variety of sensors mimicking the senses. These including: cameras (in the eyes), microphones (in the ears), accelerometers (in the head), torque sensors (in the upper arms), positional sensing at each joint, and a capacitive tactile skin covering the chest, arms, and hands. The robot can also make facial expressions using LEDs mounted behind the face cover.

The robot is connected to external power and computing infrastructure via an umbilical cable. Low level control is provided on-board via a PC104 controller, with higher-level control provided over Ethernet via the YARP middleware.

More information can be found at http://www.icub.org/