Hello Adam,
Well that’s a bunch of very good questions:)
- You understand correctly, anyone can work on its own gait but for the moment no one really tried and therefore there is, as far as I know, no ready to use autnomous walking gait.
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It is not provide by default, but some guy already did it. For example @thot in this project: Danse contemporaine - School of moon. He managed to include 4 battery packs in the legs.
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There is indeed all the eletronic in the head but there is only a small embedded computer, few cables, a camera and stereo speakers. It is not “that” heavy.
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Well, using a FDM 3D printer for Poppy Humanoid is a challenge as it has been design for being produced by SLS. It would take a really long time to do it. For the humanoid we use 3D manufacturers (sculpteo, i.materialise,…). Yet if you want to try, I think you will need at least a 20x20 plate for the legs…
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From our point of view there is a very good and expanding community. Most important for us is the multidisciplinarity of the community, diversity helps to creativity and innovations. And we have a very wide range of activities from contemporary art to scientific research, and of course educators and makers.
Yet there is indeed few public feedback. Lot of people are working on their project and does not have (/take) time to report about it on the central channel (here). I guess the 1% rule applied also to us: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%_rule_(Internet_culture).
Anyway, if you are looking for a humanoid project with a community, to my knowledge, the only other one is InMoov which has comparable community size.
I hope these short answers will help you decide whether or not the Poppy community can help you for your project 