Introduction

The iCub is a humanoid robot that developed at Istituto Italiano di Tecnolo- gia (IIT) as part of European project RobotCub and later adopted by more than 20 laboratories arround the world. It has 53 motors that can move the head, arms and hands, midriff, and legs.It can see and hear, it has the sense of proprioception1 . It’s designed to aid studies of human cognition and artificial intelligence. Project members developed computer simulator to experiment new techniques.Computer simulations are getting important in area robotics area. Simulations may not provide real complexity of the physical world and not reliable as real dynamics. The simulator of iCub is an easy way to test new algorithms and methods instead of dealing with complex configuration of iCub hardware. The simulator is designed to be accurate as real world psychics and dynamics. Development is based on directly from first prototype of simulation environment Webots.d access to source code which made hard to modify source code in order to add some functionalties.Then iCub simulation created. Simulation environment uses to simulate body movement and collision detection algorithms to measure psychical interaction with the world. ODE is used in wide range of projects like GAZEBO. ODE is an open source physics engine forauthoring tools, computer games,etc.It uses OpenGL5 renderer and it has some disadvantages due to limitation of OpenGL engine computation efficiency on complex structures. iCub simulation is using OpenGL directly via SDL which helps to render complex robot movements and computationally efficient simulation observations. The aim of this study is to experiment and understand how cognitive architecture of robotics designed and implemented.



Whole thesis can be found at : Thesis