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.

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,
 * 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. 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, evolutionary robotics , and art-oriented robotics.