Khepera mobile robot

A Khepera III robot at the Georgia Institute of Technology

The first generation Khepera robot released in 1996

The Khepera is a small (5.5 cm) differential wheeled mobile robot that was developed at the LAMI laboratory of Prof. Jean-Daniel Nicoud at EPFL (Lausanne, Switzerland) in the mid '90s. It was developed by Edo. Franzi, Francesco Mondada, André Guignard and others.

Small, fast, and architectured around a Motorola 68331, it has served researchers for 10 years, widely used by over 500 universities^{[citation needed]} worldwide.

Scientific impact

The Khepera was sold to a thousand research labs and featured on the cover of the 31 August 2000 issue of Nature. It appeared again in a 2003 article [1].

A Google scholar search with khepera mobile robots returns 3400 hits [2]. The Khepera helped in the emergence of evolutionary robotics [3][4].

Technical details

Original version

• Diameter: 55 mm
• Height: 30 mm
• Empty weight: 80 g
• Speed: 0.02 to 1.0 m/s
• Autonomy: 45 minutes moving
• Motorola 68331 CPU @ 16 MHz
• 256 KB RAM
• 512 KB EEPROM
• Running µKOS RTOS
• 2 DC brushed servo motors with incremental encoders
• 8 infrared proximity and ambient light sensors (SFH900)

2.0 Version

• Motorola 68331 CPU @ 25 MHz
• 512 KB RAM
• 512 KB Flash
• Improved batteries and sensors

Extensions

Several extension turrets exist for the Khepera, including:

• Gripper
• 1D or 2D camera, wire or wireless
• Radio emitter/receiver, low and high speed
• I/0

References

Notes

• Mondada, F., Franzi, E., Guignard, A. (1999), The Development of Khepera. In proceedings of First International Khepera Workshop, Paderborn, 10–11 December 1999. PDF BibTex EPFL Infoscience entry

External links

• Homepage – K-Team, the company which sells the Khepera robots
• The Khepera-Lisp Interface (KHLI) – library for controlling Khepera from Allegro Common LISP
• Khepera Simulator – A 2D simulator for the Khepera mobile robot
• Webots – A commercial software that simulates and allows cross-compilation and remote control of the Khepera and other robots
• khepera.cfg – Khepera configuration file for Player Project robot simulator
• YAKS at Freecode – Yet Another Khepera Simulator
• Khepera III Toolbox – A software toolbox for the Khepera III robot
• KiKS is a Khepera Simulator – Matlab based Khepera/Khepera II simulator