E-puck mobile robot
The e-puck is a small 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.
The e-puck is open hardware and its onboard software is open-source, and is built and sold by several companies.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 .
