E-puck mobile robot

Image:E-puck-mobile-robot-photo.jpg

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[http://www.gctronic.com/ GCtronic] and [http://aai.jp/ AAI] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20071212190812/http://www.aai.jp/ |date=2007-12-12 }} and sold[http://www.cyberbotics.com/e-puck Cyberbotics] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090213223806/http://www.cyberbotics.com/e-puck/ |date=2009-02-13 }}, [http://www.roadnarrows.com/store/e-puck.html RoadNarrows Robotics] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110712233118/http://www.roadnarrows.com/store/e-puck.html |date=2011-07-12 }}, and [http://www.k-team.com K-Team] by several companies.

Technical details

Extensions

New modules can be stacked on top of the e-puck; the following extensions are available:see [http://www.e-puck.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=12&Itemid=16 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 research[https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22e-puck%22+mobile+robot A 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[http://infoscience.epfl.ch/getfile.py?docid=12417&name=JP_icra07&format=pdf&version=1] [http://infoscience.epfl.ch/getfile.py?docid=13861&name=JP_cec2007&format=pdf&version=1] [http://infoscience.epfl.ch/getfile.py?recid=99957&mode=best], evolutionary robotics [https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=4218883], and art-oriented robotics [http://www.student.bth.se/~jekn05/JK_Thesis.pdf]{{Dead link|date=July 2019 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes }} [http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1278280.1278288][http://adb.sagepub.com/content/17/3/179.abstract].

References

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