Perceiving physical reality, such as touch, the weight of objects and heat, and moving in environments hundreds of kilometers away: these are some of the things that iCub3, the sophisticated avatar robot created by researchers at 'Italian Institute of Technology.
His incredible progress is described in the journal Science Robotics.
The research was coordinated by Stefano Dafarra and Daniele Pucci, and work is now underway to make it increasingly autonomous.
"We wanted to collect in a single article the innovations implemented in these 4 years on iCub3 and the demonstrations also made outside the laboratories which demonstrate its capabilities in external environments", said Pucci, head of the Artificial Intelligence and Mechanics laboratory of the IIT .
Evolution of the humanoid robot iCub born in the Iit now 20 years ago, iCub3 was developed in collaboration with the National Institute for Insurance against Accidents at Work and in recent years has demonstrated growing capabilities as an avatar, i.e. a robot guided by a remote human operator.
Its debut took place in 2021 at the Venice Biennale, when the avatar robot was controlled from a distance of 300 kilometers, transmitting every command of the operator in real time, including eyelid movements and facial expressions;
most recently, at Avatar XPrice in Los Angeles.
iCub3 competed with other robots in a Martian environment, completing tasks such as lifting and manipulating objects.
Today "iCub3 is able to transmit to the remote operator, through vibrations, also the sensation of the weight of the object and on the gloves the roughness of its surface, and in the viewers information such as the real distance of an object and soon also its temperature" , added Dafarra.
Features that have made iCub3 one of the most advanced avatar robots.
In fact, numerous applications have also been created from iCub3, such as the improvement of robotic arms used in some factories and steelworks.
"But iCub3 is not just a sort of 'puppet': it is in fact - concluded Pucci - also a platform for acquiring data on human behavior to then implement on future robots. iCub3 is allowing us to understand, for example, how and where we look during a conversation or how we explore an unknown space, all information that we will be able to implement on robots to make them more autonomous, for example to intervene in dangerous places without human intervention."
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