Robotic research benefited in the last 10 years from a standardized open-source platform for research on embodied artificial intelligence (AI), the humanoid robot iCub. Created in Italy, today it is available in laboratories across Europe, the U.S., South Korea, Singapore and Japan, and more than 100 researchers worldwide contribute to develop its skills. Researchers at IIT-Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia focused on the importance of such a research platform in a paper published today in Science Robotics.