Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

Regional Initiatives

Comacina Capsule Creative

The artist community is a rich source of inspiration and can provide new perspectives to scientific and technological questions. This complementarity is a great opportunity that we want to enforce in the Poppy project by making the robot accessible to non-robotic-expert users. The first experimentation of the use of Poppy in an art project was an artist residency entitled "Étres et Numérique". Led by the artists (Comacina Capsule Creative, http://www.comacina.org/ ) Amandine Braconnier (mixed media artist) and Marie-Aline Villard (dancer-researcher), supported by the Fabrik Pola and the Aquitaine Region, this contemporary art project focused on the way to express emotions through robotic body movement in physical interaction with a human dancer. This work took the form of a seven day art-science residency involving members of the Poppy project and the artists. During the residency, the ease of programming through the pypot library permitted to design a simple interface allowing the dancer to physically sculpt novel movements, which softness could be dynamically controlled. This residency took part in a French high school (Lycée Saintonge, Bordeaux) and was also an educational experiment where young students participated to workshops where they explored Poppy movements and physical interaction with the robot. The residency restitution was a contemporary art dance performance involving poetic choreography, alternating phases of autonomous robot movements and passive robot movements provoked by the dancer. A description of this experiment is available at: https://forum.poppy-project.org/t/artist-residency-etres-et-numerique/72 .

Poppy at Saintonge Sainte-Famille highschool (Bordeaux)

After the artistic residency that took place in the chapel at the Saintonge Sainte Famille high school, some teachers have become interested in the educational potential of the Poppy project and would like to integrate it as a common thread into the school year.

Poppy was initially designed for research purposes and seems to be also adapted for higher education. Yet using Poppy in secondary education seems excessive as it is expensive and the use of high quality servo-actuators is not really justified. However, the experience with high-school students is still interesting and we accepted this opportunity to do a pilot experiment.

For the teachers, the main goal was to gain experience of using such tools in a project context and evaluate the potential and limitations for educational purposes. For us, we were interested in the reaction of young students to Poppy and in getting an opinion on the relevance of Poppy for education at this level. Also, it was a real crash test of our design (hardware and software) in non-experienced hands and outside the laboratory.

The experiment took place in the Saintonge Sainte Famille high school on May 26th & 27th, and involved near 40 première STI2D students (equivalent to UK Year 12) preparing a professional baccalaureate and three teachers ("Energy and environment", "Architecture and construction", and "Digital information systems"). It was organized as a workshop in three 4-hour sessions. The last two hours were dedicated to oral presentations in the lecture hall allowing students to share their experiences and work.

For this first pilot experiment, we decided to reduce the cost by using only a sub-part of the whole Poppy. For us the most relevant part for high-school students was the upper body (thorax, head and the two arms), because it avoids to work on complex sensory-motor behaviours such as balancing and walking while keeping the expressive potential of Poppy. The total cost of Robotis Dynamixel motors, electronics and 3D printing service was about €2500 (20 % tax included).

The student team managed to assemble a fully functional Poppy. Groups working on control were able to make a live demo of Poppy moving at the end of the workshop.

This experience was very instructive on several aspects relative to the usage of Poppy for education purpose. In particular, it raises some problems we would have never thought about without a "real world" experimentation in a school environement.

ENSAM

The orientation of a (high school) student, choosing a career, is often based on an imagined representation of a discipline, sector of activity or training. Moreover, higher education is sometimes for a college student or a student a self centered universe, with inaccessible teaching methodologies and level of competence.

The Arts and Métiers campus at Bordeaux-Talence in partnership with Inria wishes to contribute with its educational and scientific expertise to the development of new teaching methods and tools. The objective is to develop teaching sequences based on a project approach relying on an attractive multidisciplinary technological system: the humanoid Inria Poppy robot. These teaching sequences will be built and tailored to different levels of training, from high schools to Engineer schools.

The new formation "Bachelor of Technology", started in September 2014 at Ensam Bordeaux, is resolutely turned towards a project based pedagogy, outlining concepts from concrete situations. The humanoid Inria Poppy robot offers an open platform capable of providing an unifying thread for the different subjects covered during the 3-years of the Bachelor formation: mechanics, manufacturing (3D printing), electrical, mecha-tronics, computer sciences, design…

For the 1st and 2nd year of the ENSAM Engineer cursus, the Poppy robot can again be an interesting thread to support the teaching and to conduct further investigation.

DIGITEO

Alexander Gepperth is participating in two projects (PhD and PostDoc) financed by the local "Digiteo" initiative of the Plateau de Saclay.