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 .


gollark: Well, yes, you can to some extent, for base investment in mods.
gollark: Also perhaps stargates and other long-range teleporters if I fiddle with the recipes.
gollark: For example, in my very WIP pack, Botania items (especially advanced elven/gaia ones), NuclearCraft fusion reactor/dense energy storage/radiation remover systems, compact machine factories, that sort of thing, require lots of investment in one mod or something like that, so people will probably try and make and sell those.
gollark: Really? As far as I've seen people just set up their own basement farms.
gollark: Nobody's done it on SC yet, though automated commodity markets would be extremely cool.

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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