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 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 .

