Inria

Inria is France's national research institute for computer science, founded in 1967 and funded by the state. Its place in a humanoid database comes from one team, Flowers at Inria Bordeaux Sud-Ouest, led by Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, which studies developmental robotics: how learning depends on a body. Oudeyer's ERC Starting Grant EXPLORERS (awarded in 2009, EUR 1,572,215) paid for the work.

The Poppy project started in 2012 as Matthieu Lapeyre's PhD, supervised by Oudeyer and completed in 2014. Poppy Humanoid is a child-sized biped whose skeleton is 3D printed and whose 25 Robotis Dynamixel servos account for about 60 percent of a build cost the project puts at USD 8,000 to 9,000. Hardware is released under Creative Commons BY-SA and software under GPL v3, with a web platform for sharing designs. The team says a skilled builder can assemble one in about seven hours. Cheaper variants followed: Poppy Torso for desks and classrooms, and Ergo Jr, a six-motor arm aimed at schools.

Poppy was never a product with a sales channel of its own and was not designed to do useful work; it is a research and teaching tool used in labs, engineering schools, FabLabs and art projects. Inria has not published counts of robots built or users.