A Toe-Tapping, Dancing 3D-Printed Robot Plays Music
Source: Peter Kirn
Making Music With Poppy from Pierre Rouanet on Vimeo.
It can “learn” to tap its toe and bob its head. And then it can make sounds as you move its arms. It’s a robotic interface for music �C a bit like playing with a very smart toy doll.
To show off its interactive/interfacing abilities, the team behind Poppy used music.
Poppy is a robot that can be produced with a 3D printer. All the hardware and software are fully open source. The idea �C fused with cash from the EU’s European Research Council for funding science and creativity �C is to help teach, as well as to empower engineers, scientists, and researchers. Apart from getting kids excited by being really cool, robotics are an excellent way to explore ideas in physical space, honing skills around logic as well as programming.
The combination of robotics and teaching has a long, proud history; look no further than the Logo programming language and the educational Turtle robot. See the founding pioneers of creative computing who led that effort, like roboticist and neuroscientist William Grey Walter, Wally Feurzeig, AI pioneer Seymour Papert, and notably Cynthia Solomon. Solomon helped create Logo, but also took that R&D to Apple and Atari, which brought it to the masses �C I was a child of that effort, experiencing Logo for the first time on the Apple //e and going on to teach creative coding myself.
The juncture of science and computer science with music, though is an important one. It can make those concepts expressive and immediate.
This video could just be the beginning: the research team, led by France’s Dr. Clément Moulin-Frier, produced it after just a few hours in a code spring, plus the video. So, you could well build on this idea and do something better, given more time. In the meantime, I think it’s already more than reasonably fun.
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