This is such a cool project. The instruction manual was quite exciting to see. Nicely written post.
Blossom is an open-source robot platform for human-robot interaction (HRI) research that I developed during my PhD. I’ve used Blossom for research in design, machine learning, and telepresence; others have made Blossoms for their own research purposes. I have continued working on “rebuilding” the entire platform: I redesigned the inner frame as a model kit, complete with Gunpla-inspired runners and instructions, and refactored the codebase as r0b0, a Python library for communicating between hardware peripherals and software applications. In preparation to present Blossom at Maker Faire Coney Island, I refined the telepresence interface and enabled conversational interaction with a language model. The new repository is available on GitHub and includes documentation for construction.