Do you remember when you were one and a half and you figured out how to grab your shoulder blade? Probably not. That is part of the reason why 13 research centers got together to build RobotCub.

This advanced, humanoid robot is built in the image of a three and half year old human. It took crafty European, American and Japanese (of course!) researchers from many universities and many fields -- including mechanical engineering, psychology, neurophysiology, and experts in artificial vision -- working since 2004 to build this baby.

The goal of the RobotCub (also called the iCub) is to learn more about how cognitive manipulation skills develop. You can think of "cognitive manipulation skills" as basically how the mind or brain interacts with the physical world using its body. So playing baseball would require an incredible amount of knowledge in this field; that is why the scientists are now working with a synthetic baby. Even at the baby-level, a human baby performs incredible feats of computation to figure out how to swing its limbs about to grab stuff. 

From the RobotCub_Activity_Report_M37-M48: "The iCub itself is a 53 degree-of-freedom humanoid robot of the same size as a three/four year-old child. It can crawl on all fours and sit up. Its hands allow dexterous manipulation and its head and eyes are fully articulated. It has visual, vestibular, auditory, and haptic [touch] sensory capabilities. The iCub is an open systems platform: researchers can use it and customize it freely."

This first iCub might not be the last -- it seems that the RobotCub Consortium behind this project have looked at the "possibility of commercializing the iCub" and have investigated the manufacturing requirements of building 14 new iCubs. A second iCub redesign is also in the initial planning stages, where engineers are hoping to tweak the iCub's range of movements and abilities. 

One of the major goals of the iCub project is to make an open-source standard for the design of the humanoid robot. If things work out well, you could imagine in the future there might be one massive, open-source humanoid robot OS that all budding robot-makers will use as a base to build on.