E-puck mobile robot

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The e-puck is a small (7 cm) differential wheeled mobile robot. It was originally designed for micro-engineering education by Michael Bonani and Francesco Mondada at the ASL laboratory of Prof. Roland Siegwart at EPFL (Lausanne, Switzerland). The e-puck is open hardware and its onboard software is open source, and is built^[1]and sold^[2] by several companies.

1 Technical details
2 Extensions
3 Scientific use
4 External links
5 References

[edit] Technical details

Diameter: 70 mm
Height: 50 mm
Weight: 200 g
Max speed: 13 cm/s
Autonomy: 2 hours moving
dsPIC 30 CPU @ 80 MHz (40 MIPS)
8 KB RAM
144 KB Flash
2 step motors
8 infrared proximity and light (TCRT1000)
color camera, 640x480
8 LEDs in ring + one body LED + one front LED
3D accelerometers
3 microphones
1 loudspeaker

[edit] Extensions

New modules can be stacked on top of the e-puck; the following extensions are available^[3]:

a turret that simulates 1D omni-directional vision, to study optic flow,
ground sensors, for instance to follow a line,
color LED turret, for color-based communication,
ZigBee communication,
2D Omni-directional vision,
magnetic wheels, for vertical climbing.

[edit] Scientific use

Because the e-puck is open hardware, its price is lower than competitors^[4], which lead to a rapid adoption by the scientific community^[5] despite the original educational orientation of the robot. The e-puck has been used in collective robotics[1] [2] [3], evolutionary robotics [4], and art-oriented robotics[5] [6].

[edit] External links

Homepage - the e-puck project homepage
e-puck at Mobots - the e-puck homepage at Mobots, the group who developed the e-puck
e-puck at gna - the gna page of e-puck onboard software