International audiencePoppyisthefirstcompleteopen-source3Dprintedhumanoid platform. Robust and accessible, it allows scientists, students, geeks, en- gineers or artists to explore fast and easily the fabrication and program- ming of various robotic morphologies. Both hardware and software are open-source, and a web platform allows interdisciplinary contributions, sharing and collaborations

Depraetre, Fabien

Grizou, Jonathan

Lapeyre, Matthieu

Le Falher, Alexandre

Nguyen, Steve

Oudeyer, Pierre-Yves

Rouanet, Pierre

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HAL Id: hal-01096338https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01096338Submitted on 17 Dec 2014HAL is a multi-disciplinary open accessarchive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-entific research documents, whether they are pub-lished or not. The documents may come fromteaching and research institutions in France orabroad, or from public or private research centers.L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, estdestinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documentsscientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non,émanant des établissements d’enseignement et derecherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoirespublics ou privés.Poppy Project: Open-Source Fabrication of 3D PrintedHumanoid Robot for Science, Education and ArtMatthieu Lapeyre, Pierre Rouanet, Jonathan Grizou, Steve Nguyen, FabienDepraetre, Alexandre Le Falher, Pierre-Yves OudeyerTo cite this version:Matthieu Lapeyre, Pierre Rouanet, Jonathan Grizou, Steve Nguyen, Fabien Depraetre, et al.. PoppyProject: Open-Source Fabrication of 3D Printed Humanoid Robot for Science, Education and Art.Digital Intelligence 2014, Sep 2014, Nantes, France. pp.6. ￿hal-01096338￿Poppy Project: Open-Source Fabricationof 3D Printed Humanoid Robotfor Science, Education and ArtMatthieu Lapeyre1, Pierre Rouanet1, Jonathan Grizou1, Steve Nguyen1,Fabien Depraetre1, Alexandre Le Falher1, and Pierre-Yves Oudeyer1Flowers Lab1, Inria, Francecontact: matthieu.lapeyre@inria.fr,Lab page: https://flowers.inria.frProject page: www.poppy-project.orgAbstract. Poppy is the first complete open-source 3D printed humanoidplatform. Robust and accessible, it allows scientists, students, geeks, en-gineers or artists to explore fast and easily the fabrication and program-ming of various robotic morphologies. Both hardware and software areopen-source, and a web platform allows interdisciplinary contributions,sharing and collaborations.1 The Poppy ProjectThe Poppy Project develops an open-source 3D printed humanoid plat-form based on robust, flexible, easy-to-use and reproduce hardware andsoftware. In particular, the use of 3D printing and rapid prototypingtechnologies is a central aspect of this project, and makes it easy andfast not only to reproduce the platform, but also to explore morphologi-cal variants. Poppy targets three domains of use: science, education andart.Poppy was initially designed with a scientific objective, aiming to bea new experimental platform opening the possibility to systematicallystudy the role of morphology in sensorimotor control, in human-robotinteraction and in cognitive development. Indeed, a suitable design ofa robot morphology can greatly simplify control problems, increase ro-bustness, and open new modes of interaction with the physical and socialworld. Thus, being able to study the body as an experimental variable,something which can be systematically changed and experimented, is ofparamount importance. Yet, until recently it was complicated becausebuilding a robot relied on heavy and costly manufacturing techniques.3D printing has changed the landscape of what is possible: Poppy Projecttransposed it to humanoid robotics, and it is now possible to explore newbody shapes in just a few days. It enables and simplifies the experimenta-tion, the reproduction and the modification of the morphology in researchlaboratories. It also allows collaborative working, sharing and replicationof the results on these issues between laboratories. The ambition is tobecome a reference platform for benchmarking and dissemination of sci-entific results.Thanks to the fact that it integrates advanced and yet easily accessi-ble techniques in an embodiment that motivates students and the widerpublic, this platform also meets a growing societal need: education andtraining in technologies combining computer science, electronics and me-chanics, as well as a training tool to the emergent revolutionary 3D print-ing process. With its openness, its design and its rather low-cost, Poppyprovides a unique context for experimentation and learning of these tech-nologies in a Do-It-Yourself (DIY) approach. Several experiences withPoppy in secondary, high schools, science museums and Fablabs in Franceand abroad are underway and will be discussed in the incoming sections.Finally, the possibility to easily modify both the hardware and the soft-ware also makes Poppy a useful tool for artistic projects working withinteractive computerized installations.1.1 Open-Source Robotic PlatformPoppy (Fig. 1a) is the first complete 3D printed open-source and open-hardware humanoid robot. Its 3D printed skeleton and its Arduino-basedelectronics are open-hardware (Creative Commons). Its software is open-source (GPL V3), and allows programming beginners as well as advancedroboticists to control the robot in Python thanks to the PyPot library(www.poppy-project.org/pypot-library/). Its motors are common off-the-shell Robotis actuators (http://www.robotis.com/xe/dynamixel_en), and allow for compliant control and soft physical human-robot in-teraction. Poppy presents an original mechanical structure which permitsto obtain a light structure with 3.5kg for 84cm height. Before the arrivalof 3D printing techniques, this kind of complex structure was either im-possible to produce or extremely expensive. Now, anyone can produceand modify such robot in their home using affordable personal 3D print-ers.Several web tools support collaboration and sharing among membersof the Poppy community: a portal web site (www.poppy-project.org),GitHub repositories for the hardware and software with associated wikisfor documentation (www.github.com/poppy-project/), and a forum basedon Discourse1 technology (forum.poppy-project.org).2 Case StudiesScience: Studying the Role of Morphology in Biped Locomo-tion The geometry and distribution of mass in the body has complexinfluences on biped locomotion. Thanks to the conception of Poppy al-lowing easy, cheap and fast morphology modifications, we were able toexperiment the impact of various thigh shapes on the robot dynamics. Inparticular, we have investigated in [1] the impact of a bio-inspired thigh,bended of 6o and with a geometry inspired by humans, on the balance1 www.discourse.org(a) bended thighs (b) straight thighsFig. 1: 3D printing allows very fast design/print/experiment cycles. Here, we usedit to compare the impact of two thigh morphologies on biped balance control: (a)thigh bended by an angle of 6o and (b) a more classical approach with straightthighs.and biped locomotion and we have compared this design with a moretraditional straight thigh (see Fig. 1). A few robots like HRP-4C [2] andKenshiro humanoid [3] robots seem to visually have a morphology designclose to the thigh shape of Poppy, but no comparative study of the roleof this shape was presented so far.Experiments conducted with Poppy have shown that the bio-inspiredthigh allows the reduction of falling speed by almost 60% (single sup-port phase) and the decrease of the lateral motion needed for the masstransfer from one foot to the other by 30% (double support phase).We also conducted an experiment where the robot produces a dynamicgate on a treadmill and we have measured that the bended thigh re-duces the upper body motion by about 45% indicating a more stablegait [1]. Walking happens currently with external support, since therobot is not equipped with balancing algorithms. The design of sucha capability is the object of several ongoing projects in the community,where the forum we designed is used to openly share scientific ideas (seehttps://forum.poppy-project.org/category/science).Education: Learning to Build Poppy in a Science Museum Onmarch 22th & 23th 2014, UniverSciences2 organized a hackathon forthe general public around the assembly of a Poppy robot (see Fig. 2). Itinvolved 15 robotic enthusiasts, from children to adults. Participants weredispatched around several workshops during the two days. While a group2 Paris museum of sciences and technologieswas dedicated to the actual assembly of the different Poppy parts, otherswere exploring how to program the robot with the Python software orworking on designing and 3D printing hardware improvements. Aside theworkshops around Poppy, several presentations and conferences aboutrobotics were set-up. In this context, participants are not only spectatorsof a scientific mediation act but also actors.In two days, this group of new users, self-trained using online documen-tation have been able to build from scratch the whole robot and make itmove using the Pypot library. They even designed a new original semi-passive solution for the ankle joint, as well as a robot helmet which was3D printed and assembled within the time of the workshop. This ex-periment did not only show that the platform was easily usable in aneducational context with users of all ages, and was rebuildable in twodays by a little group, but it also showed high educational value as tes-tified by users and educators (see https://forum.poppy-project.org/t/poppy-project-at-la-cite-des-sciences-et-de-lindustrie/)(a) Universcience hackathon in progress (b) Poppy fully-assembledFig. 2: The Poppy humanoid platform was entirely reproduced in a 2-day edu-cational workshop by visitors of Paris science museum.Art: Movements with a Dancer The artist community is a rich sourceof inspiration and can provide new perspectives to scientific and techno-logical questions. This complementarity is a great opportunity that wewant to enforce in the Poppy project by making the robot accessible tonon-robotic-expert users. The first experimentation of the use of Poppy inan art project was an artist residency entitled ”Êtres et Numérique”. Ledby the artists3 Amandine Braconnier (mixed media artist) and Marie-Aline Villard (dancer-researcher), supported by the Fabrik Pola and theAquitaine Région, this contemporary art project focused on the way3 Comacina Capsule Creative, http://www.comacina.org/to express emotions through robotic body movement in physical inter-action with a human dancer. This work took the form of a seven dayart-science residency involving members of the Poppy project and theartists. During the residency, the ease of programming through the Py-pot library permitted to design a simple interface allowing the dancerto physically sculpt novel movements, which softness could be dynami-cally controlled. This residency took part in a French high school (LycéeSaintonge, Bordeaux) and was also an educational experiment whereyoung students participated to workshops where they explored Poppymovements and physical interaction with the robot (see Fig. 3). The res-idency restitution was a contemporary art dance performance involvingpoetic choreography, alternating phases of autonomous robot movementsand passive robot movements provoked by the dancer. A description ofthis experiment is available at: https://forum.poppy-project.org/t/artist-residency-etres-et-numerique/72(a) Floorwork (b) Physical interactionFig. 3: Poppy has been an actor of a contemporary dance performance involvingrich physical human-robot interactions.References1. Matthieu Lapeyre, Pierre Rouanet, and Pierre-Yves Oudeyer. PoppyHumanoid Platform: Experimental Evaluation of the Role of a Bio-inspired Thigh Shape. In Humanoids 2013, Atlanta, United States,October 2013.2. Kenji Kaneko, Fumio Kanehiro, Mitsuharu Morisawa, Kanako Miura,Shin’ichiro Nakaoka, and Shuuji Kajita. Cybernetic human HRP-4C. In Humanoid Robots, 2009. Humanoids 2009. 9th IEEE-RASInternational Conference on, pages 7–14. IEEE, 2009.3. Yuto Nakanishi, Shigeki Ohta, Takuma Shirai, Yuki Asano, Toy-otaka Kozuki, Yuriko Kakehashi, Hironori Mizoguchi, Tomoko Kuro-tobi, Yotaro Motegi, Kazuhiro Sasabuchi, Junichi Urata, Kei Okada,Ikuo Mizuuchi, Masayuki Inab, and Others. Design Approach ofBiologically-Inspired Musculoskeletal Humanoids. International Jour-nal of Advanced Robotic Systems, 10(216):1, 2013.

Poppy Project: Open-Source Fabrication of 3D Printed Humanoid Robot for Science, Education and Art

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Poppy Project: Open-Source Fabrication of 3D Printed Humanoid Robot for Science, Education and Art

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