They have a name and a face and now they try to have a soul as well. They are robots more and more like us, automata with human features and advanced degrees of social interaction so as to be able to enter hospital wards to help doctors in psychiatric therapies or neurological developmental disorders. And Italy is at the forefront with these new steps in robotics. In Tuscany the ‘Enrico Piaggio’ Research Center of the University of Pisa has created Abel, an android who looks like a 12-year-old boy and also manages to perceive his surroundings. In Genoa, the Italian Institute of Technology has developed iCub which has the shape and size of a child about 4 years old: it is the only robot in the world to have its own body covered with an artificial skin – a tactile sensor – which allows it to understand if and how it is touched by humans and to respond appropriately. The little iCub – from the English cube, meaning puppy – is the most widespread humanoid robot in the world. There are currently over 40 laboratories in the world who use iCub for their studies on Artificial Intelligence, in Europe, the USA, Japan and South Korea. A few months ago, for the first time in the world, the humanoid robot iCub entered a clinical rehabilitation center as part of an experimental therapy in the treatment of autism. “Abel has a strong biomimicry, with iCub we have focused more on mechanics. And the reality is that as Italians we position ourselves very very well in the global robotics panorama “underlines Giorgio Metta – scientific director of the Italian Institute of Technology (Iit)
, interviewed by Adnkronos.
“Robotics in Italy is very strong from a research point of view, robotics is a very pervasive technology and our country does very well. If we look through the international databases of publications in robotics, Italy has a performance that places it between the first and second place in the world, according to the indicators we want to consider “, Metta emphasizes. The scientist therefore remembers – in addition to Abel of the ‘Enrico Piaggio’ Research Center of the University of Pisa and iCub at the IIT of Genoa – also” the group of robotics of Naples of the Federico II University, a very strong group on industrial robotics and an inter-university laboratory together with several universities in the South and coordinated by Professor Bruno Siciliano “. To these are added, among others,” the robotics of the Sant’Anna School of Pisa and centers for biomedical applications such as that of the biomedical campus in Rome. “Robotics is a very lively sector in Italy” remarks Metta, who once was one of the three Italian representatives at the G7 forum
on artificial intelligence of 2018 e one of the authors of the Italian Strategic Agenda on Artificial Intelligence. Just Metta has coordinated the development of the iCub robot for over a decade making it, in fact, the reference platform for research in Artificial Intelligence and present in dozens of laboratories around the world.
Metta’s research takes place in the field of bio-inspired systems and humanoid robotics, with particular reference to the design of machines that can learn from experience. From his work, more than 300 scientific publications were born – as author or co-author – as well as having held the role of Principal Investigator in about a dozen international and industrial research projects. Furthermore, the technology developed on the iCub robot is finding applications in the biomedical and rehabilitation fields: from robotic limbs as prostheses for amputees, to the exoskeleton for the lower limbs as support for paraplegic patients up to the treatment of patients suffering from diseases in the spectrum autism. And it is precisely in this last area that Since last December an iCub experiment has started at the Don Orione Boggiano Pico Center in Genoa. A team of researchers from the Italian Institute of Technology and a medical team from Opera Don Orione are experimenting with the use of the child robot to improve the social interaction skills of children with autism.