We first covered the iCub, an open source robot, in a post last year.? It's a robotics project funded by the European Commission and there are several versions of the iCub (one is shown here) in research labs and at universities throughout Europe. The goal of the multi-year project, which began in 2004, is to imbue iCub with several types of learning capabilities, shedding light on how robots can become smarter, and on how human beings learn and understand each other.
The hardware design for iCub is publicly shared, and the software for iCub is open source. You can find the hardware specs here, and links for the software here. Recently, iCub has been in the news, with some interesting videos of its newfound capabilities, and evidence that it is one of the more advanced humanoid robots anywhere.
