Fifteen-year-old Dimitris Hatzis of Greece has become the youngest person on Earth to create a functional, life-size, 3D-printed robot that looks and acts surprisingly like its human inventor. It wasn’t a weekend hobby just for kicks, though. The teen was the youngest participant in ‘InMoov’, an open source project run by French sculptor and designer Gael Langevin. Hatzis spent more than 1,400 hours over the course of a year to plan, build, and perfect “Troopy,” his 3D-printed pal.
Hatzis was reportedly inspired to build a humanoid robot by the 2011 sci-fi film Real Steel starring Hugh Jackman. The young inventor is one of only six people to successfully complete the open source robotics project, through which Langevin supplied a design that is “replicable on any home 3D printer with a 12 x 12 x 12cm area.” The ambitious teen printed 475 separate parts that consumed about a kilometer (more than half a mile) of ABS plastic, and then pieced them together to build his life-size robot.
Related: InMoov is an open source humanoid robot you can make with a 3D printer
The other builders who ended up with working robot sidekicks are Langevin himself, two Russians, an Italian, and a German. The Greek teen worked alongside the others as peers, despite a big age difference.
Troopy has many impressive features you expect to see in a life-size robot. It can move its head and eyes independently, and has five degrees of freedom in each arm. Degrees of freedom (DOF) is a mechanical engineering term used to describe the variation of motion, and most humanoid robot arms have five to seven DOF. This kind of flexibility enables a humanoid robot to move more like an actual human. In addition to looking and moving similar to a human, Troopy also speaks fluent English.
No matter how cool we think Troopy is, its inventor still sees room for improvements. “Every new robot has an improved model of the previous one – this is why the robot hasn’t yet morphed into its final form and maybe never will, constantly being improved and updated,” said Hatzis.
Via Oddity Central
Images via Green Gateway
