Simulating and getting inspiration from biology is certainly not a new endeavor in robotics. However, the use of humanoid robots as tools to study human cognitive skills it is a relatively new area of the research which fully acknowledges the importance of embodiment and the interaction with the environment for the emergence of motor skills, perception, sensorimotor coordination, and cognition.

The guiding philosophy – and main motivation – is that cognition cannot be hand-coded but it has to be the result of a developmental process through which the system becomes progressively more skilled and acquires the ability to understand events, contexts, and actions, initially dealing with immediate situations and increasingly acquiring a predictive capability.

To pursue this research, a humanoid robot (iCub) has been developed as result of the collaborative project RobotCub (http://www.robotcub.org) supported by the EU through the "Cognitive Systems and Robotics" Unit of IST. The robotic platform has been designed with the goal of studying human cognition and therefore embeds a sophisticated set of sensors providing vision, touch, proprioception, audition as well as a large number of actuators (53) providing dexterous motor abilities. The project is "open", in the sense of open-source, to build a critical mass of research groups contributing with their ideas and algorithms to advance knowledge on human cognition.

The aim of the talk will be: i) to present the approach and motivation, ii) the illustrated the technological choices made and iii) to present some initial results obtained.