Welcome to this new blog posts called “Poppy around the world”. In two years, we send many Poppy robots all over the world. We asked their many users to give us a feedback about their experience with the robot and to tell us a bit more about their projects with Poppy.
For this first blog post, let’s go to Germany, at the Technical University of Munich!
The robot is very popular among students of the course, we will order a second one due to popularity!
Who?
Technical University of Munich, Dominik Meyer, Dr. Hao Shen and Prof. Klaus Diepold
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty
Which Poppy robot?
Poppy Humanoid robot (without 3D printed parts)
Which project did you use Poppy for?
The Poppy full robot is used in the lecture
“Applied Reinforcement Learning”
amongst other robot platforms, such as
ePuck
and TurtleBot.
The students will learn the
theoretical
aspects of Reinforcement Learning in a lecture prior to the practical part. In this practical part the task is to devise a task that Poppy or the other robots should learn, first simulate it using
WeBots
and then implement it on the
real robotic platforms
.
Did Poppy meet your expectation?
Most definitely! Poppy did meet the expectations with respect to looks and functionality . Also it is very popular among students , such that we will order a second one for the coming summer semester.
The possibility to customize the robot with respect to shape is very useful as the students can use the 3D printer to manufacture custom parts for their experiments or repair broken parts in case of accidents.
Where it didn’t meet the expectations is that 3D printing on a standard FDM printer is not easily achievable. We had to put quite a significant amount of work and time into redesigning parts and find optimal print parameters and print orientation.
If you chose Poppy for a specific project, please explain why you decided to go with the Poppy robot rather than a different one.
- More customizable than the NAO (which would be similiar in price)
- Open Source
- Attractive looks and size
- Good software support
- Pretty stable and easy to repair
Did you have to “upgrade” or improve your robot by adding sensors, changing the 3D parts, etc.
We modified the printed parts in order to be able to print on our own printer.
Resources for the Poppy project at the Technical University of Munich
Github for the Poppy project at the Technical University of Munich
If you would like to read more teacher/researcher feedback about our robotics platform, start with this one: Baxter for education: an interview with Bram Vanderborght
The Poppy robot is a great technological platform for education, discover why here: Poppy: an educational robotics platform