E-puck mobile robot

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.

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:^[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[1] [2] [3], evolutionary robotics [4], and art-oriented robotics [5]^{[permanent dead link‍]} [6][7].

References

1. GCtronic and AAI Archived 2007-12-12 at the Wayback Machine
2. Cyberbotics Archived 2009-02-13 at the Wayback Machine, 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)

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
• [8] - epuck2 MATLAB kernel