iCub the Baby Robot Learning to Speak

Based on a report by Ann-Sophie

His name is iCub, and he is a small robot who is one metre in height, and who will perhaps one day be celebrated as being the first android to have learned how to speak thanks to learning methods similar to those which human babies use.

He may still be far from C-3P0, the protocol droid of the Star Wars movies, who according to his statements was fluent in "more than six million forms of communication", but researchers of the University of Plymouth, in the UK, are working on a plan which could well take this planet's robotics forward toward those in the worlds of George Lucas. They are indeed going to try to teach the basics of language to a baby robot, named iCub, applying teaching methods which are used to train human babies. In order to do that the scientists are included into an international consortium named ITALK (Integration and Transfer of actions and Language Knowledge in Robots) who started their activities on 1st March 2008.
From no knowledge to begin with of action, objects or language, iCub will be taught in the same manner as human babies. iCub will be subjected to shape recognition tests, with beakers and wooden stacking cubes. He will also have to develop his language, which will notably allow him to describe the actions which he achieves. He will start with sentences like "robot places stick on cube". A bit short certainly, but like our own babies, it is just a beginning.

The iCub robot using his "multimodal saliency-based attention system" whereby his eye and neck movement decisions are based on visual and acoustic saliency maps. The system gives iCub an emergent exploratory behavior.

After 4 years it is intended that iCub will be able to speak with the same capability of a toddler of 2 to 3 years of age. This linguistic acquisition will be correlated with the development of its social aptitudes and manipulative skills, which will create a cycle of positive feedback. Exactly as a child who learns by imitating his parents and by interacting with the environment around them.

The icub robot drumming

The iCub at Plymouth is part of a european artificial intelligence project involving 4 robots at different sites around the UK. This experiment is only one stage in the perfecting of social robots which will perhaps be present in the homes of the next generation of humans. Maybe our own children will be teaching future iCubs to speak, learn and interact with them.

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