Poppy: Open-Source, 3D Printed and Fully-Modular Robotic Platform for Science, Art and Education Matthieu Lapeyre
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Poppy: open-source, 3D printed and fully-modular robotic platform for science, art and education Matthieu Lapeyre To cite this version: Matthieu Lapeyre. Poppy: open-source, 3D printed and fully-modular robotic platform for science, art and education. Robotics [cs.RO]. Université de Bordeaux, 2014. English. tel-01104641v1 HAL Id: tel-01104641 https://hal.inria.fr/tel-01104641v1 Submitted on 18 Jan 2015 (v1), last revised 13 Jul 2015 (v3) HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution - NonCommercial - NoDerivatives| 4.0 International License Poppy: open-source, 3D printed and fully-modular robotic platform for science, art and education. Matthieu Lapeyre September 26, 2014 Version: 0.13 Inria Bordeaux Sud-Ouest Flower team Submitted in fulfillment of requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Specialized in Computer Science Poppy: open-source, 3D printed and fully-modular robotic platform for science, art and education. Matthieu Lapeyre 1. Reviewer Fethi Ben Ouezdou Vice-président à la Valorisation de la Recherche et de l’Innovation Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines 2. Reviewer Jacques Droulez Institut des Systèmes Intelligents et de Robotique UPMC CNRS Supervisors Pierre Yves Oudeyer September 26, 2014 Matthieu Lapeyre Poppy: open-source, 3D printed and fully-modular robotic platform for science, art and educa- tion. Submitted in fulfillment of requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Specialized in Computer Science , September 26, 2014 Reviewers: Fethi Ben Ouezdou and Jacques Droulez Supervisors: Pierre Yves Oudeyer Inria Bordeaux Sud-Ouest Flower team 200 Avenue de la vieille tour 33401 and Bordeaux Abstract This thesis suggests novel approaches and design processes to create and pro- duce robotic platforms, the control and morphology of which can be freely explored through experimentation in the real world, that are easy to diffuse and reproduce in the research community. Especially, this alternative design methodology is driven by the desire to: • freely explore morphological properties, • reduce the amount of time required between an idea and its experimentation on an actual robotic platform in the real world, • makes experiments that should be easy to do, actually easy to do, • make the work easily reproducible in any other lab, • keep the work modular and free to use in accordance with open source princi- ples, so it can be reused and extended for other projects. Our approach follows novel design methods for both design and production, for all technological aspects of the robot (i.e. mechanics, actuation, electronics, software, distribution). In particular these methods relies on 3D printing for all mechanical parts, the Arduino electronic architecture for the sensors acquisition, an easy to use Python API called pypot for the control and finally the disctribution of all our work under open source licenses. Using this methodology, we create the Poppy Humanoid robot, a fully modular robot allowing exploring freely the role of morphology and adapting its body to specific experimental setup. We experiment the use of this robot for several application. First, as a scientific tool and we show that Poppy can be easily and quickly modified to either explore the role of morphology or to be adapted to different experimental setups. Based on this work, but from another perspective we investigate the potential impact of such platform for educationnal and artistic applications. v Keywords: Morphology, Humanoid. This work has been supported by INRIA and the ERC grant EXPLORERS 24007. Résumé vi Acknowledgement First of all, I would like to thank Pierre-Yves Oudeyer for supervising me along this PhD thesis. Apart from his excellent advice and open minded supervision, he has been an example both as human-being and as a professional researcher. Moreover, he strongly supported the development of the Poppy project and is a main motor for the dissemination of the platform. Numerous thanks for Pierre Rouanet, Jonathan Grizou, Didier Roy, Steve N’Guyen, Nicolas Rabault, Clement Moulin-Frier, Stephane Ribas, and Patrick Guillaud who actively participated to the technological development of the Poppy platform and its open source diffusion. I would like to thank all members of the Flowers laboratory for the amazing and unique atmosphere of the team, for sharing their knowledge and allowing me to learn every day. I also thank our team assistants Nicolas, Nathalie, Catherine, and the numerous internship students. In addition, I would like to thank Jasmine Garside for her amazing work and help as a first proofreader of this manuscript. Many thanks to the members of my jury, Dr Fethi Ben Ouezdou, Dr Jacques Droulez, Dr Thierry Vieilleville and Mrs Anne-cecile Worms for accepting to review this work and taking part of the PhD defense 1. I would like to thank the Inria staff for their support during the Poppy Project birth. IT people, Aurelien Dumez and Nicolas Sulek, for their work to set up all web platforms, needed to the creation of a successful open source project. General services people, J-P.Brumaud, P.Dieudoné, L.Dufayet for their daily support. The communication service, S.Valerius and L.Kovacic for their excellent advices and work to make the Poppy project known and understood outside the laboratory. The technology transfer service, P.Moussier and M.Cromer for their work on the trademark protection. Finally, I would like to thanks the Inria general direction for supporting and promoting the project, making this possible the continuation of this PhD thesis work as an applicative engineering project for research and education people. 1video of the PhD defense: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6f0D-HHyqho vii During these three years, I had the chance to engage in different collaborative works. I would like to thank everyone who take the risk to start unique projects with a completely new and under development robotic platform. Thus, I thank the LPPA Laboratory for being the very first external entity to build a Poppy Humanoid at the early stage of the development process (only 5 months). I thank the Comacina Capsule creative Association, A.Braconnier and M-A.Villard, for their work as the first artistic project with the Poppy platform. I thank the Citée des Sciences museum for the autonomous organisation of Hackathon dedicated to our project. I thank the Saintonge Sainte-Famille high school and especially J.Claverie for being the first educational establishment to use Poppy as a tool for young students. I thank the ENSAM Paris and Bordeaux engineering school for including Poppy in their course. And finally, I would like to thank all members and actors of the growing Poppy community. Unlimited thanks to my family for always have been supportive with all the projects I started since I was a young child, and especially to have always allowed me to do what I wanted. Among all, I thank my dear Rafiaa for being here along all these years, her open-minded ideas and the inexhaustible source of inspiration she is to me, also I guess the Poppy project creation would not have been possible without the unlimited support she gave to me. viii Contents 1 Introduction 1 I Related Work 9 2 Exploring robot morphology: some fascinating work 11 2.1 Introduction . 11 2.2 Exploring the role of robot morphology . 14 2.3 Conclusion . 21 3 Review of experimental methods 23 3.1 Introduction . 23 3.2 Platform exploring the role of morphology . 25 3.3 Commercial humanoid platforms . 28 3.4 Conclusion . 30 4 The open hardware and 3D printing revolution 33 4.1 Introduction . 33 4.2 The 3D printing revolution . 34 4.3 The open hardware movement . 40 4.4 Conclusion . 47 II The Poppy project 49 5 Motivations and Methodology 51 5.1 Introduction . 51 5.2 Challenges . 52 5.3 The chosen design methods . 55 5.4 Allowing cumulative and Open science . 61 5.5 Conclusion . 63 6 The development of Poppy 65 6.1 Introduction . 65 6.2 Exploring morphological variants . 68 6.3 Lightweight . 75 ix 6.4 A little robot . 79 6.5 Pelvis . 83 6.6 Multi-articulated torso . 85 6.7 Electronic architecture . 90 6.8 Aesthetic design of the head . 99 6.9 Limitations . 102 6.10 Conclusion . 104 7 Pypot: An open source modular python library for robot control 107 7.1 Introduction . 107 7.2 Control of custom robots made simple with pypot . 108 7.3 Modular environment . 113 7.4 Discussion . 121 7.5 Conclusion . 123 III Applications 127 8 Changing Poppy’s morphology 129 8.1 Experimental evaluation of the role of the morphology: the thigh shape130 8.2 Rapid morphological exploration . 141 8.3 Extending the sensor apparatus of Poppy . 149 8.4 Discussion & Conclusion . 153 9 Education 155 9.1 Introduction . 155 9.2 Educational exploration with Poppy in high school . 158 9.3 Fablab workshop . 164 9.4 Lessons learn . 166 9.5 Discussion . 169 9.6 Future work . 171 10 Art 175 10.1 Introduction . 175 10.2 Motivation . 178 10.3 The Êtres et numérique project . 179 10.4 Discussion . 186 IV Discussions 189 11 Open diffusion of Poppy: perspectives and challenges 191 11.1 Introduction . 191 11.2 Creating a multidisciplinary community . 192 x 11.3 Create relevant educational content . 195 11.4 Improving hardware modularity .