iCub is a humanoid robot designed to support research in embodied AI. At 104 cm tall, iCub has the size of a five year old child. It can crawl on all fours, walk, and sit up to manipulate objects. Its hands have been designed to support sophisticated manipulation skills. iCub is distributed as Open Source following the GPL licenses and can now count on a worldwide community of enthusiastic developers. The entire design is available for download from the project’s repositories (
http://www.iCub.org). More than 40 robots have been built so far which are available in laboratories across Europe, US, Korea, Singapore, and Japan. It is one of the few platforms in the world with a sensitive full-body skin to deal with the physical interaction with the environment including possibly people. I will present the iCub project in its entirety showing how it is evolving towards fulfilling the dream of a personal humanoid in every home. Approach (optional): The iCub stance on artificial intelligence postulates that manipulation plays a fundamental role in the development of cognitive capability. As many of these basic skills are not ready- made at birth, but developed during ontogenesis, we aimed at testing and developing this paradigm through the creation of a child-like humanoid robot: i.e. the iCub. This “baby” robot is meant to act in daily life scenarios, performing tasks useful for learning while interacting with objects and people. The small (104cm tall), compact size (approximately 29kg and fitting within the volume of a child) and high number (53) of degrees of freedom combined with the Open-Source approach distinguish iCub from other humanoid robotics projects developed worldwide.