An Italian-designed robot has passed a non-verbal version of the Turing test. Researchers at IIT-Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Italian Institute of Technology) in Genova’s iCub robot passed the test, which required the robot to respond to stimuli when controlled by a human and when being run by its AI programme.

The research group, coordinated by Agnieszka Wykowska, head of IIT’s Social Cognition in Human-Robot Interaction lab found that people interacting with the robot were not able to tell whether the robot was human-controlled or pre-programmed. However, the robot was only programmed to mimic certain human responses like timing and accuracy. Wykowska and her team now hope to programme their robot to display more complex human behaviours.