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.
New modules can be stacked on top of the e-puck; the following extensions are available:
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 roboticshttp://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 https://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=1278280.1278288http://adb.sagepub.com/content/17/3/179.abstract.