e-puck solving a maze

As a result from Rene's and Kevin's work, we can show a maze-solving application for an e-puck. The approach has been implemented on real hardware and tested in a simulation using Webots. To solve the task, different sensors of the e-puck (IR-Light Sensor, Distance Sensor, ...) have been combined, so that the e-puck could solve this maze. The robot follows the right wall, until he finds its goal (a dark sector in the maze) - then the LEDs are blinking and it makes a sound, so you notice, it has finished.

As you can see in the video, the approach works (though the robot is moving a bit slowly); also the simulation predicts very similar results.

First e-puck test with a follower application

An e-puck is a small differential-wheeled robot. The openness of the design makes the e-puck especially interesting for academic use. The hardware and software is under an open source license which allows for modifictaion and redistribution of the design. Besides being cute, e-pucks offer a lot of sensory functions and allow us to do hands-on experiments on collaborative robot algorithms.

The video shows a simple follower application, which we used to test the robot. The e-puck is using its sensors to follow an object - in this case the engineer's hand.
Thanks to Rene and Kevin for making this video.