E-puck mobile robot

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.

e-puck mobile robot

Technical details

Extensions

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

  • a turret that simulates 1D omnidirectional vision, to study optic flow,
  • ground sensors, for instance to follow a line,
  • color LED turret, for color-based communication,
  • ZigBee communication,
  • 2D omnidirectional vision,
  • magnetic wheels, for vertical climbing,
  • Pi-puck extension board, for interfacing with a Raspberry Pi single-board computer.

Scientific use

Since the e-puck is open hardware, its price is lower than competitors.[4] This is leading to a rapid adoption by the scientific community in research[5] despite the original educational orientation of the robot. The e-puck has been used in collective robotics , evolutionary robotics , and art-oriented robotics .


References
  1. GCtronic and AAI
  2. Cyberbotics, RoadNarrows Robotics Archived 2011-07-12 at the Wayback Machine, and K-Team
  3. see extensions section at e-puck.org
  4. the e-puck costs around 950 CHF at time of writing, while the Khepera is around 3000 CHF
  5. A search on Google scholar of e-puck + mobile + robot returns 528 papers (2012-01-05)
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