Alice mobile robot
Encyclopedia
The Alice is a very small "sugarcube" mobile robot (2x2x2cm) developed at the ASL at the EPFL in Lausanne
, Switzerland
between 1998 and 2004.
It was designed with the following goals:
Lausanne
Lausanne is a city in Romandy, the French-speaking part of Switzerland, and is the capital of the canton of Vaud. The seat of the district of Lausanne, the city is situated on the shores of Lake Geneva . It faces the French town of Évian-les-Bains, with the Jura mountains to its north-west...
, Switzerland
Switzerland
Switzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....
between 1998 and 2004.
It was designed with the following goals:
- Design an intelligent mobile robot as cheap and small as possible
- Study collective behavior with a large quantity of robots
- Acquire knowledge in highly integrated intelligent system
- Provide a hardware platform for further research
Main Features
- Dimensions: 22 mm x 21 mm x 20 mm
- Velocity: 40 mm/s
- Power consumption: 12 - 17 mW
- Communication: local IR 6 cm, IR & radio 10 m
- Power autonomy: up to 10 hours
Main Robot
- 2 SWATCH motors with wheels and tires
- Microcontroller PIC16LF877 with 8Kwords Flash program memory
- Plastic frame and flex print with all the elecronic components
- 4 active IR proximity sensors (reflection measurement)
- NiMH rechargeable battery
- Receiver for remote control
- 24 pin connector for extension, voltage regulator and power switch
Extension modules
- Linear camera 102 pixels
- Bidirectional radio communication
- Tactile sensors
- ZigBeeZigBeeZigBee is a specification for a suite of high level communication protocols using small, low-power digital radios based on an IEEE 802 standard for personal area networks. Applications include wireless light switches, electrical meters with in-home-displays, and other consumer and industrial...
ready radio module running TinyOSTinyOSTinyOS is a free and open source component-based operating system and platform targeting wireless sensor networks . TinyOS is an embedded operating system written in the nesC programming language as a set of cooperating tasks and processes. It is intended to be incorporated into smartdust...
Projects and applications
- 20 robots at Swiss Expo.02
- RobOnWeb
- Navigation and map building
- Soccer Kit : 2 teams of 3 Alices play soccer on an A4 page
- Collective behavior investigations: video.mov 1 and 2
- Mixed society robots-insects as part of the European LEURRE project
- Investigation of levels of selection and relatedness on the evolutionEvolutionEvolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...
of cooperationCooperationCooperation or co-operation is the process of working or acting together. In its simplest form it involves things working in harmony, side by side, while in its more complicated forms, it can involve something as complex as the inner workings of a human being or even the social patterns of a...
in the ANTS project
External links
- The homepage of the Alice microrobot at the Autonomous Systems Lab at EPFL
- - Autonomous Systems Lab at EPFL
- Collaborative Coverage with up to 30 Alices
- http://www5.epfl.ch/swis/page9117.html - ZigBeeZigBeeZigBee is a specification for a suite of high level communication protocols using small, low-power digital radios based on an IEEE 802 standard for personal area networks. Applications include wireless light switches, electrical meters with in-home-displays, and other consumer and industrial...
ready radio module running TinyOSTinyOSTinyOS is a free and open source component-based operating system and platform targeting wireless sensor networks . TinyOS is an embedded operating system written in the nesC programming language as a set of cooperating tasks and processes. It is intended to be incorporated into smartdust...