Introducing i-puck: An educational mobile robot

Abstract

The employment of mobile robots in educating undergraduate and graduate students are shown to be an effective complementary tool to traditional methods. In fact, students will effectively get involved in theories which they learn in related courses of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics area. Currently, the available mobile robots are mostly capable of handling specific tasks such as localization, mapping, and path planning. However, most of them are not affordable and/or not widely available to all. In this paper, i-puck, an affordable mobile robot inspired from e-puck, is introduced. i-puck consists of essential modules needed for teaching AI and robotics. In this paper, we explain the use of i-puck in teaching robot localization and mapping.