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Written by Administrator
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Wednesday, 24 November 2010 12:58 |
Spirit of the e-puck project
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This project has been started at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne as collaboration between the Autonomous Systems Lab, the Swarm-Intelligent Systems group and the Laboratory of Intelligent System.
An educational robot
The main goal of this project is to develop a miniature mobile robot for educational purposes at university level. To achieve this goal the robot needs, in our opinion, the following features:
Good structure. The robot should have a clean mechanical structure, simple to understand. The electronics, processor structure and software has to be a good example of a clean modern system.
Flexibility. The robot should cover a large spectrum of educational activities and should therefore have a large potential in its sensors, processing power and extensions. Potential educational fields are, for instance, mobile robotics, real-time programming, embedded systems, signal processing, image or sound feature extraction, human-machine interaction or collective systems.
User friendly. The robot should be small and easy to exploit on a table next to a computer. It should need minimal wiring, battery operation and optimal working confort.
Good robustness and simple maintenance. The robot should resist to student use and be simple and cheap to repair.
Cheap. The robot, for large use, should be cheap (450-550 euros)
An open hardware platform
To help the creation of a community inside and outside EPFL, the project is based on an open hardware concept, where all documents are distributed and submitted to a license allowing everyone to use and develop for it.
Status of the project
A first set of 20 robots (e-puck version 1) has been produced in november 2004 and tested in the courses "microinformatique I" and "microinformatique II". The results of these tests have been used to create a new version of the robot (e-puck version 2) during summer 2005. We have produced 400 units of this final version in the beginning of 2006. Version 2 is incompatible with version 1 and we therefore discourage everybody to start working on version 1. Version 2 includes many improvements and is a stable one.
Distribution
Two manufacturing companies are started the production of e-puck and several distributors have started to sell it. We list them on this sit in the section "Where to buy". If you are interested in producing / distributing this robot please let me know.
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Last Updated on Wednesday, 01 December 2010 10:13 |
