[CFC] Inflatable soft body enveloppe for Poppy Humanoid

Hello contributors,

giving robot soft bodies is today a major challenge, as it opens fantastic possibilities for human-robot interaction, robustness and flexibility. Here we call for a contribution that would consist in designing an inflatable soft body enveloppe for Poppy.

What do I mean? This could like the body enveloppe of the Baymax robot in the Disney movie Big Hero 6

Actually, the Baymax robot appears to be inspired by work on real inflatable robots developped at CMU University, and in particular Chris Atkeson, a great robotics researcher, as well as Siddharth Sanan’s research on inflatable robots.
Actually, this group is targeting to build a real Baymax, read here their project and support them too!:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~cga/bighero6/
On twitter: #BuildBaymax @ChrisAtkeson

This group has already great ideas: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~cga/bighero6/#How
(and Chris Atkeson did impressive tests :slight_smile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ufolJXE5_Y )

Other sources of ideas and tricks:

A related project was the Aibo Playroom project where ECAL students (design school) and Frédéric Kaplan worked on a swimming suite for the AIBO robot (see end of video), which with Frédéric we used in experiments on curiosity-driven learning (which can now be done with the pypot-compatible Explauto library):

So the target of this contribution is to design and build something similar for Poppy!

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