Kinematic and Dynamic Simulations for the Design of iCub Upper-Body Structure

In this paper we present kinematic and dynamic simulations of the humanoid robot iCub in operation. ICub is the result of RobotCub, an EU-funded project, which aims at developing an open-source humanoid platform by following an original research line in synthetic cognition. Workspace analysis and singular positions have been computed for the structure of the upper-body sub-systems. Simulations validated the manipulation performance of iCub under dynamic conditions. Actuating torques have been computed on the joint structure. The analysis of the results may suggest that further design improvements are possible for iCub.