Poppy the Robot- A revolution in open-source robotic platform which defies conventions

Poppy Front View

Poppy Side View

When the world runs behind artificial intelligence and amazing robots which even defeats the human performance, there is someone somewhere making a small revolution through open-source. The someone somewhere is a mini robot named 'Poppy'. Even though it have been inspired from movies, science and art, Poppy still makes its mark in this platform. 

When I first read about this robot, I wondered why this robot is so special. But when I had a chance to have a deep look into it, there were no words to say. :) 'Poppy' the wonderful creation was born in Inria Flowers Lab in France. This robot was developed as an Open-source humanoid based on robust, flexible ans user friendly hardware. As we all know when we use a Windows based system, no one has to teach us anything. Everything is given, its user friendly and self-learnt. When we come to this robot too, we get such an amazing experience. At a price of 7500 - 8000 Euros, its cheap and takes just 2-3 days time for the entire assembly.

Human Robot Interaction

Poppy was initially designed to conduct scientific experiments and to integrate several key abilities in an user friendly robot platform. But now the face of 'Poppy' have changed. Its going to be used for research, artists and education. 

So what are the specialities of Poppy design?

Key specialities are:

1) Easy to Duplicate

2) Robustness and lifelong learning

3) Easy to set up

4) Affordable. 

Poppy Assembly Kit

Other special features includes: 

1) Lightweight: All mechanical parts are designed to optimize weight and make Poppy as light as possible. 

2) Large sensorimotor space: In 'Poppy' the sensorimotor space is composed by more than 100 dimensions giving access to several kinds of data such position, speed, temperature, space etc.

3) Polyamide material: Parts are printed using this material and selective laser sintering techniques. The result is light weight, flexible and strong mechanical parts.

4) Bio-inspired morphology

5) Human proportion

6) Semi-passive knee

7) Multi-articulated trunk: 'Poppy' has 5 motors in the trunk allowing the reproduction of the main DOFs of the human spine.  

8) Availability of PyPot library: It is a library in the Poppy project to make it easy and fast to control custom robots based on dynamixel robots. This is entirely written in Python language which will help it for fast development, easy deployment and quick scripting even by the non-necessary developers. The serial communication is handled through the standard library and thus allows higher performance. Mind it, it is also crossed-platform and has been tested on Linix, Windows and Mac OS. 

9) Fully documented: Anyone can customize robot since entire tutorial and samples are available. 

Poppy Walking Led by Hand

Really wonderful, isn't  Yes. Its wonderful. But still I don't know where the Poppy stands in the humanoid robot platform. I felt like its not given the proper value or attention which it deserves. But as I told before, 'Poppy' the someone somewhere is still getting ready to make a huge mark, making all of us excited, amazed and inspired. :) 

"Thanks and Congrats to the Poppy Team- the dream team"

From the left: Jonathan Grizou (Phd Student), in the middle: Pierre Rouanet (Research Engineer), right: Matthieu Lapeyre (Phd Student)