Supriya Ghosh (Editor)

E puck mobile robot

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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 and sold by several companies.

Contents

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:

  • 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.

    • Scientific use

    Since the e-puck is open hardware, its price is lower than competitors. This is leading to a rapid adoption by the scientific community in research 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][7].

    References

    E-puck mobile robot Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA