Crawling iCub Is the Robot Baby You Never Wanted

As far as robot babies go, iCub is not the weirdest of the bunch. The fact that it's also one of the most capable robot babies out there doesn't necessarily help its case, though, since watching it crawl around the floor is a tad unnatural, to say the least:

iCub, if you remember, is designed to emulate a three and a half year-old child, although personally I don't know any kids that young who I'd trust with a bow and arrow (or a lit torch). In addition to these potentially destructive hobbies, and crawling, iCub is intended to explore how human cognition develops, using facial expressions and adaptive learning techniques. Sometimes those facial expressions don't work out so well, though, especially when iCub is being calibrated:

Yeah, uh, I don't know exactly what button they pushed to get iCub to look like that, but I just wish I had one attached to me somewhere. Here's a photo of iCub enjoying San Francisco, and below is one more pic of the bot looking slightly more normal, from the IROS expo floor last week: