On October 24, 2009, after an incredibly long gestation compared to the human one, but perfectly normal for a robot, iCub was born. Inside it has 53 motors that allow him to move his head, upper limbs and waist (the legs still not). Yet what strikes us is the face: it looks like a child. He is the size of a 3 and a half year old child, they tell us that day: 104 centimeters tall, weighs 22 kg. Yes, but it is the gaze, the gaze of that big white head, that displaces us and makes us fall in love. It looks alive (moves eyelids and lips, something that was quite rare at the time).
iCub is presented at the seventh edition of Science Festival, a worthy initiative that takes place in Genoa, not far from the laboratories of the Italian Institute of Technology where iCub was built. The project started in 2003, when the IIT was just born: the father of the robot is considered Giorgio Metta, who today leads the IIT, but the scientist who led the Institute from the foundation also played a fundamental role until some time ago, Roberto Cingolani, now Minister of Ecological Transition. The idea, the aim of the project, was to create an open source platform that would allow everyone to study how robots work and design improvements. From this point of view, the project was successful: iCub has been adopted by many research institutes and next to him at the IIT other types of robots were born.
iCub remains however the symbol, the “poster-boy” of Italian innovation invited to any event. The Italian Tech Week also opened on 21 September with a speech in which he told us humans “you don’t have to fear robots”. But obviously it was a text written by IIT researchers who like their colleagues from other research institutes complain that robotics and artificial intelligence have been snubbed by the National Recovery and Resilience Plan. And without money, you can’t grow up. Perhaps this is also why iCub has remained the same as it was on that day in October 2009: a robot-child forever.
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