- E-puck mobile robot
The e-puck is a small (7 cm) differential wheeled
mobile robot . It was originally designed for micro-engineering education byMichael Bonani andFrancesco Mondada at the ASL laboratory of Prof.Roland Siegwart atEPFL (Lausanne ,Switzerland ). The e-puck isopen hardware and its onboard software isopen source , and is built [http://www.gctronic.com/ GCtronic] and [http://aai.jp/ AAI] ] and sold [http://www.cyberbotics.com/ Cyberbotics] , [http://www.roadnarrowsrobotics.com/acatalog/GCtronic_epuck.html RoadNarrows Robotics] , and [http://www.k-team.com K-Team] ] by several companies.Technical details
* Diameter: 70 mm
* Height: 50 mm
* Weight: 200 g
* Max speed: 13 cm/s
* Autonomy: 2 hours moving
* dsPIC 30CPU @ 30MHz (15 MIPS)
* 8 KBRAM
* 144 KB Flash
* 2 step motors
* 8infrared proximity and light (TCRT1000)
* color camera, 640x480
* 8LEDs in ring + one body LED + one front LED
* 3Daccelerometers
* 3microphones
* 1loudspeaker 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&task=view&id=21&Itemid=48 extensions section at e-puck.org] ] :
* a turret that simulates 1D omni-directional vision, to studyoptic flow ,
* ground sensors, for instance to follow a line,
* color LED turret, for color-based communication,
*ZigBee communication,
* 2D Omni-directional vision,
* magnetic wheels, for vertical climbing.Scientific use
Because the e-puck is open hardware, its price is lower than competitorsthe e-puck costs around 950 CHF at time of writing, while the Khepera is around 3000 CHF] , which lead to a rapid adoption by the scientific community [http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22e-puck%22+mobile+robot A search on Google scholar of e-puck + mobile + robot] returns 19 papers] 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 [http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=4218883] , and art-oriented robotics [http://www.student.bth.se/~jekn05/JK_Thesis.pdf] [http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1278280.1278288] .External links
* [http://www.e-puck.org Homepage] - the e-puck project homepage
* [http://mobots.epfl.ch/e-puck.html e-puck at Mobots] - the e-puck homepage at Mobots, the group who developed the e-puck
* [http://gna.org/projects/e-puck e-puck at gna] - thegna page of e-puck onboard softwareReferences
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