The iCub robot helps scientists to understand human

His name is iCub and scientists hope to learn to adapt their behavior to changing circumstances, providing insights into the development of human consciousness.

There are six versions of iCub in laboratories throughout Europe, where scientists are carefully manipulating its electronic brain to be able to learn, just like a human child.

"Our goal is to really understand something that is very human: the ability to cooperate, to understand what someone else wants us to do, be able to align with them and work together," said research director Peter Ford Dominey.

iCub is five feet tall, has articulated trunk, arms and legs made of intricate electronic circuits. It has a white face with a small nose and large eyes that can see and follow the movement of objects.

"We play as usual or something new?" Said Dominey iCub during a recent experiment at a laboratory in Lyon in southeast France. His voice was robotic, as expected, though his intonation of a person to ask something.

The "game" was that a person lifting a box and showed the toy beneath. Then someone else picked up the toy before putting it back on the floor. In the end, the first person to put the box back on the floor, covering the toy.

Having seen two humans do, iCub could join the game.

"The robot is proving that you can change roles. You can play the role of first or second person," said Dominey, which is funded by the European Union for his work with iCub.

"These robots will be a tremendous tool for analytic philosophy and philosophy of mind," said Dominey, an expert in computational neuroscience, computer modeling for different brain functions.

Dominey said that after years of research had understood that these models need to be "released into the world" to interact with humans.

The more immediate goal is to provide practical applications iCub.

In the short term, that could mean use in hospitals to help patients physiotherapy playing with them. In the long term, iCub could achieve sufficient autonomy to help around the house, making their own assessments of needs.

"People have their habits, putting the dishwasher, putting the dishes (...) The aim is that the robot can reach aser a wizard (the home)," Dominey said.

"There will be tomorrow. Maybe in the next decade we start seeing this sort of thing," said the scientist.