Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia

The Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia is a state-funded research foundation created by Italian law in 2003 and operating since October 2005, headquartered in Genoa with satellite centres around Italy. It receives about EUR 90 million a year from the government and Wikipedia gives a headcount of roughly 1,900. Giorgio Metta, one of the original iCub designers, is scientific director.

IIT's reputation in humanoids rests on iCub, a child-sized open-source research robot that came out of the EU RobotCub project (EUR 8.5 million, September 2004 to January 2010). It is 104 cm tall, 22 kg, with 53 actuated degrees of freedom, built in Genoa at around EUR 250,000 a copy, and about thirty exist in labs, mostly in Europe. Hardware, software and documentation are released under GPL, which is why so much European humanoid research still runs on it.

Two later machines extended the line. WALK-MAN, an EU-funded full-size disaster robot, was the only European entry at the June 2015 DARPA Robotics Challenge finals and in 2016 inspected earthquake-damaged buildings in Amatrice. ergoCub, announced in March 2021 as a three-year, EUR 5 million project with the workplace-injury insurer INAIL under Daniele Pucci, is a sturdier iCub descendant for hospital and factory work. None of these has been commercialised; IIT builds research platforms, not products.