Levinson Group Only U.S. Lab Awarded Highly Advanced iCub Robot 

The “adoption” process is almost complete, “parenting” classes have been taken and now all that is left is to wait for the new addition to the “family” to arrive from Europe. Adoption, parenting, and family are all analogies in the case of the new addition because it is built of metal and plastic but made to act, respond, and learn like a human child.

Sometime this fall the Beckman Institute will become home to a unique new student from Europe – the only one of its kind in the United States – in the form of a highly-advanced humanoid robot. If all goes as planned, in late October an “iCub” robot from a European “robot consortium” will go through the final phase of its adoption process and join Artificial Intelligence group member Stephen Levinson’s Language Acquisition and Robotics Laboratory.

The iCub will learn about language as a child does: through interactions with the world around it, by learning about its own body movements and motor skills, and by absorbing knowledge from its “parent-teachers”, aka the members of Levinson’s lab.

The iCub, as described by the RobotCub project that created it, is a “full-fledged humanoid robot ‘child’ with sophisticated motor skills and several sources of sensory information.” Levinson’s lab was one of seven research entities awarded a free iCub – estimated to cost about €200,000 – in an open call competition put out by the RobotCub project. The robot is so special in its capabilities that the Department of Defense wanted one to share among its research groups, but its proposal wasn’t accepted. The proposal from the Language Acquisition and Robotics Laboratory was accepted, thanks to Levinson’s area of research.

“People all over the world are clamoring to get these robots,” Levinson said. “The fact that we’re getting one is amazing.”

Not only will Levinson’s lab have the only iCub in the United States and North America, it will also be the only research group in the world using one to study language acquisition. That fact, as much as anything, is why the lab’s proposal was selected to receive one of the humanoid robots.

“That is the thing that really attracted them,” Levinson said. “We were very specific about language acquisition.”

When it arrives, this new addition to Levinson’s robot family will mark a huge leap up the robotics evolutionary ladder for the lab. The lab’s current lineup of three robots, known as Trilobots, feature wheels, sensors, and platforms for electronic equipment, but have limitations on their sensing and learning capabilities. The concept behind the iCub is to use its human-like motor skills, physical and sensing capabilities, and highly advanced open source software programming to recreate the learning processes of young children.

“The idea is that the richer the sensory motor periphery of the robot, the more elaborate learning that can take place,” Levinson said. “We simply want to experiment on that basis.”

Levinson said the new robot can reach, grasp, feel, and look with enhanced sensing abilities that most other robots, including his lab’s trio of Trilobots, just don’t possess. The new robot will not only be able to pick up a ball and learn its meaning, but also learn to distinguish properties such as whether the ball is hard or soft and rough or smooth, as a child does.