e-puck Open Source Robot

These are open source robots called e-puck, look like lots of fun. A little out of the hobbyist budget at $700, but for a research platform that is cheap!

“The main goal of this project is to develop a miniature mobile robot for educational purposes at university level. To achieve this goal the robot needs, in our opinion, the following features:
* Good structure. The robot should have a clean mechanical structure, simple to understand. The electronics, processor structure and software has to be a good example of a clean modern system.
* Flexibility. The robot should cover a large spectrum of educational activities and should therefore have a large potential in its sensors, processing power and extensions. Potential educational fields are, for instance, mobile robotics, real-time programming, embedded systems, signal processing, image or sound feature extraction, human-machine interaction or collective systems.
* User friendly. The robot should be small and easy to exploit on a table next to a computer. It should need minimal wiring, battery operation and optimal working confort.
* Good robustness and simple maintenance. The robot should resist to student use and be simple and cheap to repair.
* Cheap. The robot, for large use, should be cheap (450-550 euros)”

Via: Robot Gossip