Europe funds research into humanoid robots

Citation

Kochan, A. (2005), "Europe funds research into humanoid robots", Industrial Robot, Vol. 32 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/ir.2005.04932dab.003

Europe funds research into humanoid robots

Europe funds research into humanoid robots

Keywords: Europe, Robotics

The European Commission is funding a 8.5 million project on humanoid robots through the E5 Unit (cognition) of Information Society Technologies, part of the Sixth Framework Programme.

Known as RobotCub, the five year project aims to design the mindware and hardware for a humanoid platform that is to be used to investigate human cognition and human-machine interaction. The platform, or Cognitive Universal Body (CUB) that results, will be open and available to the research community at large for use in further work on humanoid-based cognitive systems. It will be licensed following a General Public license to the scientific community. To facilitate the adoption of the RobotCub platform by scientists, the project's budget includes 2.1 million especially for building ten humanoids and supporting 10-15 start-up projects.

An International Research and Training Site dedicated to the CUB platform will be set up, with at least three complete systems available to be used for updating and maintaining the CUB technology, and training scientists and students how to develop and use CUB components. The Site will also include a multidisciplinary research centre for scientists wishing to embark on preliminary research into embodied cognition.

The RobotCub humanoid will have dimensions similar to those of a two- year old child. It will have a head, torso, two arms and hands, and two legs. The legs will be used for crawling, not bipedal walking. Initial discussions about the platform suggest RobotCub will have about 54 degrees of freedom (seven for each arm, eight for each hand, seven for the head, three for the torso and spine, and seven for each leg).

Project Manager for RobotCub is Professor Giulio Sandini of the Department of IT, Systems and Telecommunications at the University of Genoa, Italy. He is managing a consortium that includes 11 European research centres plus two in the USA and three in Japan specialising in robotics, neuroscience and developmental psychology. It is, however, an open consortium as approximately 2 million has been reserved for future partners expected to join at the start of the second year who will be involved in projects to exploit the platform.

The European partners will receive the bulk of the funding. Funds allocated for US and Japanese research centres are devoted to supporting joint activities including short reciprocal visits of scientists.

Consortium

1. 1.

   University of Genova, LIRA-Lab, Dipartimento di Informatica, Sistemistica e Telematica, Genova, Italy

2. 2.

   Scuola Superiore S. Anna, ARTS Lab, Pisa, Italy

3. 3.

   University of Zurich, Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of Information Technology, Zurich, Switzerland

4. 4.

   University of Uppsala, Department of Psychology, Uppsala, Sweden

5. 5.

   University of Ferrara, Department of Biomedical Science, Human Physiology, Ferrara, Italy

6. 6.

   University of Hertfordshire, Department of Computer Science, United Kingdom

7. 7.

   IST Lisbon, Computer Vision and Robotics Lab, Lisbon, Portugal

8. 8.

   University of Salford, Centre for Robotics and Automation, Salford, United Kingdom

9. 9.

   Ecole Polytechnique Federal de Lausanne, Autonomous Systems Lab, Lausanne, Switzerland

10. 10.

    Telerobot S.r.l, Genova, Italy

11. 11.

    European Brain Research Institute, Rome, Italy

NON-EU partners

• •

  MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, University of Minnesota, School of Kinesiology, Department of Neuro- logy Communications Research Laboratory, Japan

• •

  University of Tokyo, Department of Mechano-Informatics, Intelligent Informatics Group

• •

  ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories, Kyoto

Anna Kochan Associate Editor