Section: New Results

Robot Design And Morphological Computation

Rapid morphological exploration with the Poppy humanoid platform.

Participants : Matthieu Lapeyre [correspondant] , Steve N'Guyen, Alexandre Le Falher, Pierre-Yves Oudeyer.

In the paper [53] , we discuss the motivation and challenges raised by the desire to consider the morphology as an experimental variable on real robotic platforms as well as allowing reproducibility and diffusion of research results in the scientific community. In this context, we present an alternative design and production methodology that we have applied to the conception of Poppy humanoid, the first complete 3D printed open-source and open-hardware humanoid robot. Robust and accessible, it allows exploring quickly and easily the fabrication, the programming and the experimentation of various robotic morphologies. Both hardware and software are open-source, and a web platform allows interdisciplinary contributions, sharing and collaborations. Finally we conduct an experiment to explore the impact of four different foot morphologies on the robot's dynamic when it makes a footstep. We show that such experimentation can easily be achieved and shared in couple of days at almost no cost.