The e-puck, a Robot Designed for Education in Engineering

Abstract

Mobile robots have the potential to become the ideal tool to teach a broad range of engineering disciplines. Indeed, mobile robots are getting increasingly complex and accessible. They embed elements from diverse fields such as mechanics, digital electronics, automatic control, signal processing, embedded programming, and energy management. Moreover, they are attractive for students which increases their motivation to learn. However, the requirements of an effective education tool bring new constraints to robotics. This article presents the e-puck robot design, which specifically targets engineering education at university level. Thanks to its particular design, the e-puck can be used in a large spectrum of teaching activities, not strictly related to robotics. Through a systematic evaluation by the students, we show that the e-puck fits this purpose and is appreciated by 90 percent of a large sample of students.

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The e-puck, a Robot Designed for Education in Engineering
Francesco Mondada1, Michael Bonani1, Xavier Raemy2, James Pugh2, Christopher Cianci2,
Adam Klaptocz3, St´
ephane Magnenat1, Jean-Christophe Zufferey3, Dario Floreano3, Alcherio Martinoli2
Abstract— Mobile robots have the potential to become the
ideal tool to teach a broad range of engineering disciplines.
Indeed, mobile robots are getting increasingly complex and
accessible. They embed elements from diverse fields such as
mechanics, digital electronics, automatic control, signal pro-
cessing, embedded programming, and energy management.
Moreover, they are attractive for students which increases
their motivation to learn. However, the requirements of an
effective education tool bring new constraints to robotics. This
article presents the e-puck robot design, which specifically
targets engineering education at university level. Thanks to its
particular design, the e-puck can be used in a large spectrum
of teaching activities, not strictly related to robotics. Through
a systematic evaluation by the students, we show that the e-
puck fits this purpose and is appreciated by 90 percent of a
large sample of students.
I. INTRODUCTION
Mobile robots are both fascinating objects and the result
of the fusion of multiple competences. This fascination
leads to the organization of plenty of robotics contests
worldwide annually [16]. From an engineering point of
view, the design and control of mobile robots requires skills
in many disciplines such as mechanics, electronics, energy
management, computer science, signal processing, and
automatic control. The combination of these two aspects
(fascination and inter-disciplinarity) makes mobile robots
an excellent educational platform that enables students to
address a broad range of engineering fields.
This paper presents, for the first time, the design ap-
proach resulting in the e-puck1, an educational desktop mo-
bile robot developed at the ´
Ecole Polytechnique F´
ed´
erale
de Lausanne (EP FL) for a broad exploitation in teaching
activities. The main objectives of this development were:
•The use of a common platform in all EPFL courses
related to mobile robotics, to replace the different
robots previously in use.
•The use of a mobile robot in non-robotic courses,
for instance signal processing, automatic control, and
embedded programming, in order to propose more
project-based exercises.
•The introduction of mobile robots earlier in the
curriculum, which implies the deployment in larger
classes (50 to 100 students).
II. EX I ST ING ROB OTS FO R EDU CATIO N
A wide range of mobile robots are available on the
market. In this section we survey the subset of them that
we think to be relevant as educational platforms.
This work was supported by the ´
Ecole Polytechnique F´
ed´
erale de Lau-
sanne, Switzerland (EP FL,http://www.epfl.ch) in the framework
of a FIF O project (Fond pour l’Innovation dans la Formation). All authors
are associated with EP FL, in the following laboratories: 1. Laboratoire de
Syst`
emes Robotiques, 2. Distributed Intelligent Systems and Algorithms
Laboratory, 3. Laboratory of Intelligent Systems.
1e-puck: http://www.e-puck.org
Fig. 1. The e-puck robot.
The Khepera II from K-Team is a redesign of the
original Khepera robot [15]. With the same size of the
original Khepera, it is compatible with its extensions,
software, and scientific tools. The Khepera II is interesting
because its size allows to use it on a desktop. It is expensive
(around 1500 efor a basic configuration) but is known for
being reliable and well supported.
The Hemisson from K-Team is a cheap platform (225 e)
with a diameter of 120 mm. It only provides a limited
computational power and few sensors in its basic configu-
ration, but is extensible. It is a robust platform well suited
for beginners.
The IdMind’s circular GT kit is a similar platform
slightly cheaper (210 e) with a diameter of 150 mm. It
has less standard extensions than Hemisson, but has more
I/O available ports to connect self-made extensions. It is
more suited for experimentation using custom self-made
extensions.
Even cheaper (175 e), the platform Bot’n Roll is
representative of a set of simple robots with few sensors
that are excellent starting kits for beginners. This and
the previous kit improve their accessibility by providing
graphic programming environments.
The Lego Mindstorms RCX was the first robotic plat-
form from the Lego company. The RCX is built around a
small 8 bit processor and can manage only 3 inputs and
3 outputs (typically DC motors without encoder); but the
combination with the Lego bricks makes it a fantastic tool
to discover new robots shapes. The RCX has been replaced
in 2006 by the Lego Mindstorms NXT. This newer version
is equipped with more advanced sensors, including color
and sound, and can drive motors equipped with encoders.
It is a clear reference in the field because of its good
computational power, its flexibility and interesting price
(260 e).

The Palm Pilot Robot Kit (PPRK) is a commercially
available platform2from Carnegie Mellon University com-
bining a mobile base and a personnal digital assistant
(PDA ), originally a Palm Pilot. The PDA provides the
computational power and the user interface and controls the
sensors and the actuators through a serial connection with
a PIC processor. The result is a compact omnidirectional
platform with three distance sensors (in its basic config-
uration for 250 e). Furthermore, the availability and the
maturity of Palm development tools makes this platform
an interesting starting kit.
The Cye platform3is a medium-size robot
(40×28×13 cm) equipped with special wheels that
ensure a good odometry. Its price is around 540 e.
Designed for indoor domestic environments, Cye can
carry extensions such as a vacuum cleaner and can
navigate in indoor environments.
The Khepera III from K-Team is a research oriented
platform much larger than the Khepera II (120 mm of
diameter). It is adaptable to specific research requirements
through extensions, for instance the korebot board which
provides an XScale processor. Flexible, efficient, and pow-
erful with respect to its size, this robot is also quite
expensive as an educational robot (around 2000 ein basic
configuration).
The ER1 from Evolution Robotics4is a simple alu-
minum frame kit supporting a laptop (not included) and
equipped with wheels. The laptop provides the computa-
tional hardware, which improves the performance / cost ra-
tio of the kit (the basic configuration costs around 230 e).
The motor wheels controller has some free inputs/outputs
but provides limited computational power. This low-cost
kit comes with a sophisticated but expensive software
environment for navigation and vision.
The KHR-1 from Kondo 5has been the first humanoid
robot with good mobility capabilities (17 DOF) for a price
under 1000 e.
The Pioneer 3 (P3) is the latest version of the Pioneer
robot by ActivMedia. It is a large (44×38×22 cm) solid
platform on which the user can install custom processors,
sensors, and actuators. The AmigoBot of the same com-
pany is a cheaper version (1550 e) of the same concept.
The Garcia from Acroname6is a small robot frame
(25×18×10 cm) designed to be controlled by a companion
XScale board. The size of Garcia makes it suitable for
experiments in compact environments. Its price is around
1360 ein the basic configuration.
Robotino from Festo7is a modern mobile robotic plat-
form for education. Robotino runs a real-time Linux kernel
and is built around industrial standards. These features
make this robot powerful in term of computational power
but also expensive (about 4500 e). Robotino is well
suited for technical schools that want to approach technical
problems using robotics.
Roomba Create from iRobot is an educational/research
version of the roomba vacuum cleaner. Devoided of the
2PP RK:http://www.cs.cmu.edu/˜pprk/
3Cye: http://www.personalrobots.com
4Evolution Robotics: http://www.evolution.com
5Kondo: http://www.kondo-robot.com
6Acroname: http://www.acroname.com
7Festo: www.festo-didactic.com
cleaning module, this platform provides low cost mobil-
ity (100 e). Its sensors, designed for vacuum cleaning
tasks, offer a good support for reactive navigation. The
limited internal processor, dedicated to the low-level robot
control, is programmable by simple scripts. Any advanced
programming or supplementary I/O requires an additional
main processor.
III. ROBOT DESIGN FOR ENGINEERING EDUCATION
Most of the aforementioned products are exclusively
either efficient mobile robots or good educational tools.
However, being both implies the following criteria:
•Desktop size. A robot that can evolve on the desk
near the computer improves drastically the student
efficiency during experimentation. We consider that
for a good mobility, the experimentation space should
be 10 times the diameter of the robot. On a table, this
implies a robot diameter smaller than 80 mm.
•Wide range of possibilities from an engineering and
educational point of view. To exploit this tool in
various fields of education such as signal processing,
automatic control, embedded programming, or dis-
tributed intelligent systems design, the robot should
provide a wide set of functionalities in its basic
version.
•User friendly. The user interface has to be simple,
efficient, and intuitive. This is an important point for
the acceptance of the system by the students.
•Low cost. The broad introduction in engineering
classes requires a large number of robots. Knowing
that the budget of many schools is constant or de-
creasing, this is only feasible by reducing the cost of
an individual robot.
•Open information. This robot has to be shared among
professors, laboratories, schools and universities. An
open source hardware/software development model is
an effective way to achieve this goal.
None of the platforms available on the market is re-
specting these criteria. Most robots are large and thus need
to operate on the floor. The smallest robots are either
expensive or have limited functionalities. Very few are
open source.
This motivated us to create the e-puck robot in summer
2004. We tested a first set of prototypes with students
during the 2004–2005 academic year. Based on this ex-
perience, we redesigned the robot and produced the final
version in summer 2005 (Fig. 1). The following sections
present the robot design and a student evaluation based on
its use during four semesters from 2005 to 2007.
IV. THE E -P UC K DES KTOP MO BIL E ROBOT
We based the design of the robot on the first two
aforementioned criteria: desktop size and flexibility. Com-
bined, these two constraints imply the miniaturization of
a complex system. To achieve a low price, we opted
for the use of cheap components and mass production
manufacturing techniques. We took special care to make
the robot as user-friendly and interactive as possible, in
order to ensure that it would be well received by students.
In this design process, a central aspect is the choice
of the robot features. This particular choice is one of the

innovations of the e-puck design. The sensors, actuators,
and interfaces of the e-puck are representatives of a wide
range of devices one can find in several engineering sub-
domains:
•sensors in different modalities: audio, visual, dis-
tances to objects, gravity,
•input devices with different bandwidths from 10 Hz
to 10 MHz (Figure 2, left),
•actuators with different actions on the environment
(Figure 2, right),
•wired and wireless communication devices,
•two types of processors: general purpose and DS P.
By exploiting this large set of possibilities, a teacher
can present and the student can practice a broad set of
engineering fields and skills.
IR proximity
INPUTS
10-100Hz
PROCESSING OUTPUTS
PIC core
Generic, C prog.
DSP core
Specific, ASM prog.
Motors
displacement
COMMUNICATION
Bluetooth RS232
Accelerometer 0.1-1kHz Lateral LEDs
display
Microphones 10-40kHz Speaker
audio
Camera 10k-10MHz Front LED
directed
IR remote 1kHz serial
code Body LED
aesthetic
radio cable
Fig. 2. The e-puck allows exploration of different engineering topics,
control options, and signal bandwidths.
For applications where the basic features are not suffi-
cient, the e-puck can be extended with specific hardware.
We provide embedded software consisting of a library
and several demo applications. We also provide an open
source simulator and a monitoring tool to run on a desktop
computer. In this section we present the detailed hardware
and software design choices.
A. e-puck hardware (basic configuration)
1) Microcontroller: The electronic structure of the e-
puck (Fig. 3) is built around a Microchip dsPIC mi-
crocontroller. This microcontroller complies with the ed-
ucational criteria of flexibility because it embeds both
a 16 bit processor with a 16 entry register file and a
digital signal processor (DS P) unit. This CPU runs at 64
MHz and provides 16 MIPS of peak processing power.
The instruction set is mostly orthogonal8and rich; in
particular, it contains multiply-acccumulate and hardware-
repeat instructions suitable to drive the DSP unit, for
instance to efficiently compute scalar products and fast
fourier transforms. Finally, this processor is supported by
a custom tailored version of the GCC C compiler. For the
e-puck, we chose a microcontroller version with 8 kB of
RA M and 144 kB of flash memory.
8An instruction set is orthogonal if any instruction can use data of
any type via any addressing mode (http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Orthogonal_instruction_set)
5Wh Battery
swappable and
rechargeable
1.8V
regul.
2x stepper
motors
8x IR prox.
8x Red Leds
CMOS
color
camera
audio
codec
3x micro
speaker
3D
accelero-
meter
extension connectors
3.3V regul.
ON -
OFF
RS232
connector
programming/
debug connector
to all
devices
battery
protection
low battery detection
RESET
running
mode
selector
low battery
indicator
power-
on led
body light
IR remote
control Front Led
dsPIC 30F6014A
16 Mips
8kB RAM, 144kB FLASH
14MHz
clock
bluetooth
radio link
Fig. 3. The outline of the electronic of the e-puck.
2) Sensors and actuators: To ensure a broad range of
experimentation possibilities, the e-puck contains various
sensors covering different modalities:
•Eight infrared (IR ) proximity sensors placed around
the body measure the closeness of obstacles or the
intensity of the ambient infrared light. These are
typical sensors for simple navigation in cluttered
environments.
•A 3D accelerometer provides the acceleration vector
of the e-puck. This vector can be used to measure
the inclination of the e-puck and the acceleration
produced by its own movement. It can also detect
collisions and if the robot falls. This sensor is rarely
included in miniature low-cost mobile robots. We
decided to include it because it allows a rich set of
experiments.
•Three microphones capture sound. Multiple micro-
phones allow the e-puck to localize the source of
the sound by triangulation. The bandwidth of this
signal is much larger than the one of the accelerometer
or of the infrared sensors, making the microphones,
because of their larger computational demands, the
ideal tools to learn how to use the DS P unit.
•A color CMOS camera with a resolution of 640×480
pixels in front of the e-puck enables experimentation
in vision. Only a sub-part of the image can be
grabbed: the size of acquisition is limited by the
memory size of the dsPIC and the rate is limited
by its processing power. Any format of sub-image
is acceptable, providing these two constraints are
fulfilled. For instance, the e-puck can grab a color
image of 40×40 pixels at 4 frames per second; the
frame rate is doubled in gray-scale. This limitation
shows to the students the impact of high bandwidth
sensors such as cameras.
The e-puck provides the following actuators:
•Two stepper motors. They control the movement of

the wheels with a resolution of 1000 steps per wheel
revolution.
•A speaker, connected to an audio codec. Combined
with the microphones, the speaker can create a com-
munication network with the ability to detect the
direction of peers. It is also an excellent output device
for human interaction.
•Eight red light emitting diodes (LE D) placed all
around the e-puck. These LE Ds are covered by a
translucent plastic and the e-puck can modulate their
intensities. They provide a visual interface with the
user; furthermore, another e-puck can observe them
with its camera which allows mutual visual interac-
tions.
•A set of green LE Ds placed in the transparent body.
By lighting the body, they improve the interactions
with the user.
•A red front LE D placed beside the camera. This L E D
generates a focused beam that projects a red spot
on objects in front of the e-puck. Combined with
the camera, this spot allows distant measurements at
longer range than the infrared proximity sensors.
3) User interface: The e-puck also contains several
devices to interact with the user and to communicate with
other equipments:
•Two LEDs show the status of the battery: One indi-
cates whether the robot is powered on, while the other
indicates a low battery condition.
•A connector to interface to an in-circuit debugger, to
program the flash memory and to debug code.
•An infrared remote control receiver, to control the e-
puck with standard television remote controls.
•A classic RS232 serial interface to communicate with
a desktop computer.
•A Bluetooth radio link to connect to a desktop com-
puter or to communicate with up to 7 other e-pucks.
•A reset button.
•A 16 positions rotary switch to specify a 4 bit number,
which can be used, for instance, to select among pre-
programmed behaviors or parameters.
4) Mechanics: The robot has a diameter of 75 mm
and a height which depends on the connected extensions.
The mechanical structure of the e-puck consists of injected
plastic parts. We have chosen this manufacturing technique
because it reduces the unit price of the robot for sufficient
quantities. The robot structure is simple, being made of
only four injected plastic parts: the main body, the light
ring, and the two wheels (Fig. 4). The main body is the
core of the mechanical structure and encloses the battery.
The user can extract the battery from the bottom of the e-
puck. The two motors are simply laterally screwed onto the
main body, with the wheels directly attached to the motor
axis. The main printed circuit board (PCB), containing most
of the electronics, is screwed on top of the main body.
A light diffusion ring and a default extension board are
mounted over this main PC B; the user can replace the
default extension board with application specific boards,
as illustrated by some examples in the next section. All
mechanical parts are transparent and allow to observe all
components.
light diffusion
ring
default top
extension turret
left wheel
motors
main mechanical
body
right wheel
LiIon battery
main CPU board extension
connectors
slot for bottom
extension
Fig. 4. The mechanical structure of the e-puck in an exploded view.
B. e-puck extensions
To address the needs of specific teaching scenarios that
require different mechatronics, the user can connect phys-
ical extensions to provide additional sensors, actuators,
or computational power. Extensions physically connect
through an extension bus which routes a two wires inter-
processor communication bus (I2C) as well as the connec-
tions to most sensors.
There are three physically different types of extensions:
“top”, “bottom”, and “sandwich”.
Top extensions do not allow other extensions above
them. The basic e-puck includes a default extension board
of this type which provides the speaker, the 16 positions
rotary switch, the infrared remote control receiver, the
RS232 connector, and a reset button (Fig. 1, right). There
are several other extensions of this type available, for
instance:
•A rotating scanner. It is equipped with infrared trian-
gulation distance sensors with a range of 40 cm (Fig.
5, left). For exercises involving robot localization,
the short range (2–3 cm) of the proximity sensors
available on the basic version of the e-puck is not
sufficient.
•A turret with three linear cameras. It provides a very
large field of view for measuring optical flow [8], [21]
(Fig. 5, right) still requiring few memory.
Bottom extensions are internal PC Bs, enclosed in a
vertical slot in the front part of the main body. These
extensions are close to the ground and are connected to
the main PC B by an I2Cbus and a power connection. For
instance, an extension of this type provides three analog
sensors which measure the ground color (Fig. 6, left top).

Fig. 5. Two “top” extensions for the e-puck robot: an infrared distance
scanner (left) and a large field of view linear camera (right).
Fig. 6. Left top: A bottom extension to measure the ground color. Left
bottom: a “sandwich” extension implementing a Zigbee radio link. Right:
A complete visual communication system consisting of two “sandwich”
extensions.
Extensions can also be “sandwich” boards that replicate
the connector on their top, for instance:
•a Zigbee radio link with adjustable radio communica-
tion range does not require mechanical access to the
top of the e-puck [4] (Fig. 6, left bottom);
•a color RGB LE D ring (Fig. 6right);
•an omnidirectional vision turret with onboard micro-
controller dedicated to vision (Fig. 6right)
Several extensions of this type can be stacked, and a top
turret placed above (Fig. 6right).
C. e-puck embedded software
To develop software for the e-puck, we provide stan-
dard components: a bootloader to program the e-puck
over Bluetooth, a low-level library to drive the hardware,
and a monitor to communicate with a desktop computer.
Within the community of e-puck users, standard software
modules are also developed. For instance a Player server is
developed by VeRLab9. These components are all released
under the e-puck open source license.
9Player driver for the e-puck robot: http://code.google.com/
p/epuck-player- driver/
1) Bootloader: To program and debug a microcon-
troller, one typically uses an in-circuit debugger, which
is a specific piece of hardware. To reduce cost and remove
this requirement, the e-puck comes with a bootloader that
allows the user to re-program the flash of the microcon-
troller through the Bluetooth or the serial port. At boot,
the bootloader listens a small amount of time for activity
on these ports, and if none is detected, launches the user
application. During this time, the user has the opportunity
to send a special command in order to flash a new program.
2) Low-level library: To facilitate the use of the e-
puck hardware, which requires specific code with precise
timings, we provide a collection of functions called the
“Low-Level Library”. This library contains functions such
as “move the right motor at that speed”, “read 40×40 pixel
image”, or “send this message through Bluetooth”. It is
statically linked with the user application at compile time.
3) BTcom protocol: When developing for a robot, it
is often useful to be able to control it from a desktop
computer. To that end, the e-puck comes with a moni-
tor implementing a remote control protocol through the
Bluetooth or the serial port, called the “BTcom protocol”.
This protocol provides full remote control of the e-puck,
allowing the desktop computer to set the speed of the
motors, read the image of the camera, specify the state of
the LE Ds, read the accelerometer, and so on. This allows
the user to develop applications on a desktop computer,
in a comfortable environment with a rich set of develop-
ment tools. Moreover, with this approach, applications can
exceed the computational capabilities of the dsPIC. The
same strategy can be used to control the e-puck from a
simulator, such as Enki or Webots.
D. e-puck simulation
Several simulators support the e-puck. Among them,
we use Webots and Enki. Webots [13] is commercial
and supports three-dimensional physics through the ODE10
library. Enki11 is open source and provides fast 2D physics,
which, for instance, makes it suitable for evolutionary
robotics experiments [7].
E. Availability
All our software, design, and production documents are
available under an open source hardware/software license,
meaning that anyone can use and modify them as long as
they comply with the license.
Currently, two companies (GCtronic and AAI Japan)
produce the e-puck and about ten companies distribute it
under the term of the open hardware license. A growing
community is using the e-puck both for research and
education (see for instance [1], [20], [18], [12], [11], [5],
[2], [10], [14], [9], [17]).
The production price of the e-puck basic version is
around 250 e. The selling price by most companies is
around 550 e.
10Open Dynamics Engine: http://www.ode.org
11Enki: http://home.gna.org/enki/

V. ENGINEERING EDUCATION USING THE E-PUC K
ROB OT AT EPFL
At EP FL, several courses exploit the e-puck robot as ex-
perimentation platform. In particular we organize practical
exercices in the following teaching areas:
•Signal processing. We use the e-puck to explore signal
processing on sound, which is an optimal context for
education because of the signal low frequency, low
propagation speed, ease of generation, acquisition,
and direct perception by humans. In our embedded
programming course we explore signal processing ap-
plications during two sessions of five hours each. We
analyze the sound using a fast fourier transform (FFT),
with a close attention to its efficient implementation
on the DS P unit. In each session, we first present
the theory; then the students verify it on MATL A B
with data acquired from the robot, and finally they
implement it on the dsPIC of the e-puck.
•Automatic control. In our embedded programming
course, we apply automatic control concepts on the
e-puck. The goal of the five hours session is to build
a regulator that controls the e-puck and maintains a
constant distance with respect to a visual target (Fig.
7, left). The input of a proportional-integral regulator
is the estimated distance to the target, extracted from
the camera looking at a vertical black stripe on a white
background (Fig. 7, right). The output of the regulator
is assigned to the speed of both wheels, reducing the
problem to one degree of freedom.
Fig. 7. Model of the problem (left) and scheme of the regulator (right)
for the e-puck automatic control practical.
•Behaviour-based robotics. In a robotics course, we
use the e-puck to provide the students with a better
understanding of the subsumption architecture [3],
its advantages and its shortcomings. The goal of the
exercise is to implement a behavior-based controller
for a simplified industrial application consisting of the
transport of goods throughout a warehouse. The e-
puck (the carrier) has to follow a line painted on the
ground (the track), while avoiding obstacles and going
back to the line after disruption. To that end, the e-
puck is equipped with the ground sensor extension
(see Section IV-B and Fig. 6, left top).
•Distributed intelligent systems. Our course on dis-
tributed intelligent systems (formerly focusing on
swarm intelligence) includes weekly laboratory ex-
ercises in which the students use a combination of
real e-puck robots and realistic simulations using
Webots [13] to test and verify the topics and the-
ories presented in lectures. This help the students
to assimilate theoretical concepts around multi-robot
coordination and networking, and to understand the
difficulties of implementing them. This also enhances
their awareness of the differences between various
types of implementation levels; for example realistic
simulations and real experiments.
•Position estimation and path finding of a mobile robot.
In a 10 hours practical session we use the e-puck
to explore robot localization and path finding. These
techniques are active fields of research and begin
to see deployment in industry [6]. They are usually
implemented using expensive sensors such as laser
range finder [19], which, because of limited education
budgets, often restricts their teaching to simulation.
Yet simulation is not always sufficient to fully un-
derstand what is critical for correct functionality on
physical robots. The e-puck, with the distance scanner
extension (see Section IV-B and Fig. 5, left), allows
students to explore these techniques in a physical
setup.
VI. EVAL UATI ON OF E -PUCK BY THE STUDENTS
Our embedded programming course using the e-puck
has been evaluated on a regular basis since the introduction
of the e-puck in 2005. The goal of this course is the
understanding and practice of embedded programming.
Most of the course focuses on C programming, with links
to assembler and some concepts of C++. Practicals explore
signal processing and control problems. The students who
attend this course are not specialized in robotics. All the
programming exercises of this course are performed using
the e-puck as a motivation tool.
Over the first three years of e-puck use, students were
asked to give feedback about the use of the e-puck to
illustrate the concepts of the course. Fig. 8summarizes
the results of this analysis and shows that more than 90
percent of the students agree that the e-puck is a good
tool to illustrate the concepts of the course. The score has
slightly improved over the years, with the fine-tuning of
the course.
totally agree partially agree no opinion partially disagree totally disagree
February 2005, 56 students,
on ASM, C programming
February 2006, 90 students,
on ASM, C programming
June 2006, 79 students,
on C++ programming
June 2007, 48 students,
on ASM, C and C++
programming
The e-puck robot is a good tool to illustrate the concepts of the course
Fig. 8. Comparison between the evaluations of the e-puck robot as
teaching tool.
When asked about the quality of the e-puck, students
gave the feedback shown in Fig. 9. These results show that
the latest version of e-puck is considered as performing
well by more than 90 percent of the students. We observe
a clear improvement since the first version evaluated in
February 2005.
VII. CONCLUSION
The e-puck robot is an innovative education tool for
engineering in a broad sense. For its size and price, it is a
complex systems that we exploit to teach a wide range of
topics. By integrating the latest technologies in a compact

totally agree partially agree no opinion partially disagree totally disagree
February 2005,
56 students, on V1
February 2006,
90 students, on V2
June 2006,
79 students, on V2
June 2007,
48 students, on V2
The e-puck robot is performing well
Fig. 9. Comparison between the evaluation of the quality of the e-puck
robot and its on-board software, following its evolution over the years
and versions.
design, it repositions robotics in the engineering education
landscape. More than 200 students over 3 years have
validated this concept and shown their satisfaction using
the e-puck. The open-source nature of this robot improves
the quality of the support to the students by providing
full access to knowledge at every level. For teachers this
simplifies maintenance and opens new experimentation
possibilities. Finally, the rapid diffusion of the e-puck in
the research community shows its versatility as a scientific
experimentation tool.
VIII. ACKNOWLEDGMENT
We thank E PFL for funding the development of the e-
puck robot through its Funding Program for Teaching and
Learning. We also thank the Pedagogical Research and
Support team of EPFL for the detailed evaluation of the
e-puck educational performances. We finally thank our
students for their constructive feedback.
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