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 builtGCtronic and AAI and soldCyberbotics , RoadNarrows Robotics , and K-Team by several companies.
Technical details Diameter: 70 mm Height: 50 mm Weight: 200 g Max speed: 13 cm/s Autonomy: 2 hours moving dsPIC 30 CPU @ 30 MHz (15 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
Extensions
New modules can be stacked on top of the e-puck; the following extensions are available:see extensions section at e-puck.org 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.the e-puck costs around 950 CHF at time of writing, while the Khepera is around 3000 CHF This is leading to a rapid adoption by the scientific community in researchA search on Google scholar of e-puck + mobile + robot returns 528 papers (2012-01-05) despite the original educational orientation of the robot. The e-puck has been used in collective robotics , evolutionary robotics , and art-oriented robotics .
References
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 e-puck model - Documentation of the e-puck model in the Webots robotics simulator. Cyberbotics' robot curriculum - a robotics curriculum based on the e-puck robot - epuck2 MATLAB kernel