A team around doctoral student Francisco M. López from the group of FIAS Senior Fellow Jochen Triesch won the “Babybot Paper Award.” It was presented at the International Conference on Development and Learning in Prague and honors publications that establish a connection between developmental psychology and robotics and/or computer-aided modeling.

From three nominees, the publication “MIMo grows! Simulating body and sensory development in a multimodal infant model” by Francisco M. López, Miles Lenz, Marco G. Fedozzi, Arthur Aubret, and Jochen Triesch was selected for the award. At the conference, López presented the new MIMo version developed by the team, which represents various aspects of sensorimotor development more realistically. 

During infancy, the body grows rapidly and sensory and motor skills change explosively. However, developmental robots and simulation platforms are typically designed for a specific age, which limits their ability to capture the changing abilities and contraints of developing infants. MIMo v2 is a new version of the multimodal FIAS infant model with a growing body from birth to 24 months. It also has developing visual acuity and sensorimotor delays that mimic the speed of signal transmission to and from an infant's brain, as well as other improvements.

FIAS congratulates the award winners!

Conference information: IEEE ICDL 2025 – IEEE ICDL 2025

Find the arxiv preprint version of the award-winning publication at this link: 

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