Two months ago I dedicated a post to discussing the innovative humanoid child iCub project. This robot was developed during the last several years as a result of collaborations between several European universities, led by the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Genoa. The project originated in 2003 as a 5 year plan, funded by the European Commission, to develop a functioning humanoid child.
One of the most fascinating and unique features that distinguishes the iCub robot is that it represents one of the first, and so far the most successful, demonstrations of an open-source methodology applied to the task of building a humanoid robot. In an article published in the March issue of H+ magazine, Ben Goertzel highlights some fascinating points about the possibilities and promises that open-source technology may hold for the humanoid robotics industries. He introduces his article with the following sets of premises:
“Compared to many other aspects of advanced technology — even compared to AI software technology, which isn’t exactly zooming along — humanoid robotics seems to be advancing at a snail’s pace. As in many other areas, the cause of the relatively slow progress is a combination of technical and economic/cultural factors. One possible work-around to the latter, being explored by an increasing number of roboticists worldwide, is the open source development methodology.”
Goertzel then goes on to enumerate why an open-source methodology might hold the most promise for kick-starting the humanoid robotics industry:
1) while technological and economic/cultural factors have hitherto limited the viability of humanoid technologies in the U.S., there is a tremendous potential behind this realm which can be potentially harnessed by open-source methods
2) iCub so far has demonstrated some unique abilities, including a considerable range of freedom in its fingers and arms, as well as the ability to mimic human actions quite well. In the video post from the Zygbotics blog there is a clip of iCub playing the drums
3) there’s only so much specialization that one manufacturing community can demonstrate, and so to expand upon the importance of creating a robot with refined levels of perception, action, and coordination may mean that concepts such as language learning, abstraction, and cognition have to be sacrificed. The nice feature about a collaborative project like iCub is that different entities with expertise in these fields can develop and test expand the abilities of iCub beyond the limits imposed by an in-house manufacturing process.
The following are a series of articles that suggest the significant utility that the open-source methodology has for designing and building robots (in descending chronological order):
Open-Source Robotics and Process Control Cookbook – Designing and …
In this practical reference, popular author Lewin Edwards shows how to develop robust, dependable real-time systems for robotics and other control applications, using open-source tools. It demonstrates efficient and low-cost embedded …
05-04-2009 An Open Platform for Robotics Research
Willow Garage is building a personal robot platform, PR2, which has two arms, a mobile base, and a rich sensor suite. This talk will review the current status of ROS and PR2, and discuss opportunities to join the ROS Open Source …
Open Source Robotics Blog » Open Source Robotics Projects Index
Home > Reference > Open Source Robotics Projects Index. Open Source Robotics Projects Index. April 10th, 2009. Goto comments Leave a comment. There are dozens of open source projects dedicated to robotics. The hard part are finding …
Open Source Robotics Projects Index
There are dozens of open source projects dedicated to robotics. The hard part are finding those that are currently active and have some momentum, and then adapting them to your use. This is not a complete list, but here are the projects …
Open Source Robotics Looks Better Than Ever | h+ Magazine
But humanoid robotics is one area where the open source hardware approach has tremendous potential. This R&D domain is of tremendous importance to the future of humanity – and beyond – yet it’s something neither industry, … For instance, while I’m an AI guy rather than a robotics researcher, reading about iCub has inspired me to think a bit about how it might be integrated with various open source AI software platforms, robot simulators. and virtual worlds. …
OPEN SOURCE HARDWARE PROGRAME IN ROBOT TECHNOLOGY
Open source hardware refers to computer and electronic hardware that is designed in the same fashion as free and open source software (FOSS). Open source hardware is part of the open source culture that takes the open source ideas to …
Robot-Cub — Open Source Humanoid Robot
Here is a humanoid (walking, generally human-shaped) robot developed in Europe. http://www.robotcub.org/. The team has posted their designs as an open-source project. The cost to build one is reportedly about 200000 pounds (UK) which …
Tags: future of robotics, humanoid robotics, iCub, Italian Institute of Technology, open-source robotics, Zygbotics
wowie, the open source revolution is going strong ain’t it?