Icarus Technology was created in 2004 by Pal Technology, an enterprise located in the United Arab Emirates. The role of project leader was assigned from the very beginning to Davide Faconti, a young researcher that created the first italian team which participated to the Robocup Humanoid league.

Their ambitious goal was to develop a full size humanoid robot from scratch in just one year. The robot was intended to be autonomous in terms of power supply and computation and to be able to perform visually assisted grasping and dynamic biped walking. In 2004, only Japan and Korea had managed to build such kind of robots and it was commonly believed that it was impossible to achieve comparable results in such a short amount of time.

Nevertheless, Davide Faconti constituted a first team of engineers and they built the first prototype, later called REEM-A, in about 13 months. The team continued growing to improve REEM-A's skill set; the robot became able to recognize faces, understand voice commands and recognize objects, and the walking speed and stability were gratly improved.

Eventually, a second prototype was officially presented in Abu Dhabi during a press conference in 2008: REEM-B.
REEM-B possessed all the skills of its predecessor, but it was also superior in terms of battery autonomy and strength; in fact, it can still be considered, one of the strongest biped humanoid robots in the world. REEM-B was also able to navigate independently and avoid obstacles using laser based Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM).

After the successful presentation of REEM-B, the goal and commitment of the research team became to evolve the technology of the REEM series into a commercially viable platform. The whole team was moved to a new company, called Pal Robotics to better represent the brand of their sponsor, Pal Technology.The REEM series was improved in term of mechanical robustness, autonomy and price tag.
 

Davide Faconti left Pal Robotics in December 2010 to restarting Icarus Technology on his own. The company has a new mission: to provide consulting and R&D services to clients dealing with the conceptual design and/or integration of complex robotic systems. What has not changed in the past sevel years is the core value of the company: "we like to take up challenges".

An adult-size humanoid is probably one of the most challenging robotic platforms to design. The high number of degrees of freedom (more than 30) and tight constraints in terms of weight and space can only be achieved by optimizing every single part of the robot. Software integration is also very complicated, since many modules need to be created and orchestrated in real-time to perform complex actions and tasks. For this reason, the development of the REEM series of robots represented a unique opportunity to develop a heterogeneous set of skills related to robotics and mechatronics.

Core knowledge areas
These are the main skills and knowledge areas in which Icarus Technology has a solid background:

• Conceptual design of robotic systems.
• Mechanical architecture of lightweight and intrinsically safe robotic arms.
• Use of middleware for distributed computing applied to component oriented robotic software.
• Sensor integration and sensor fusion.
• Real time simulation of 3D rigid bodies.
• Kinematics.
• Algorithms for biped dynamic walking.

Complementary knowledge areas
We have also some experience in the following research fields, which are often required in complex robotics projects:

• Motor control.
• Computer vision.
• Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM).

Consider us one of your team members. We can help you with the design of prototypes, the development of specific software modules or the integration of complex system using the appropriate middleware.

Both projects and teams may grow over time, but scaling a project is not as trivial as you may believe.
If you feel that your team is not achieving 100% of its efficiency and effectiveness, we can help you manage your project. We use modern methodologies such as Agile, Scrum and Critical Chain (CCPM), specially tailored to your needs as a robotics developer.
Talk with us, if you need a short term collaboration to boost the results of your team, or if you need to hire a project manager for the entire duration of your project.

Sometimes the right decision or the right piece of information might save weeks or months of work. For this reason we believe that the purpose of consultancy is to get results faster.
We can work together with you to define the best solution to a given requirement or problem: our broad experience in robotics is the key catalyst that we add to your formula to trigger innovation.