As part of the CICADA project, a number of researchers in the
Schools of Electrical and Electronic Engineering and Mathematics
are working on learning and control approaches to make the iCub
bipedal humanoid robot walk as well as looking at fundamental
research questions. This is done in collaboration with the team
at IIT (Italian Institute of Technology), Genoa. Inherently,
flexible, dynamic locomotion is a hybrid control problem with
different gait phases (single support, double support, toe push
off, ...) being represented by different dynamic models and
controllers. The iCub is the humanoid robot which was developed
by Profs Darwin Caldwell and Giulio Sandini and their colleagues
on the EU RobotCub project between 2004 and 2010. The iCub was
originally developed as a platform for studying cognition,
indeed it is the recommended EU testbed for such studies. A
range of behaviours was demonstrated at the final review
(crawling, attention seeking, drumming, ... although learning to
walk was never included in