Khepera mobile robot

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 served researchers for 10 years, widely used by over 500 universities [A Google scholar search with "khepera mobile robot" returns 2200 hits] Fact|date=June 2007 worldwide. It is now outdated, even with its upgraded processor and flash in version 2.0.

Scientific impact

The Khepera was sold to a thousand research labs and featured on the cover of the [http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v406/n6799/index.html August 31th, 2000] issue of Nature [linked with the article of Michael J. B. Krieger, Jean-Bernard Billeter and Laurent Keller.] . It appeared again in a 2003 article [http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v425/n6958/abs/nature02024.html] .

A Google scholar search with "khepera mobile robots" returns 2350 hits [http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=khepera+mobile+robot] . The Khepera helped in the emergence of evolutionary robotics [http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/5283.html] [http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/112793.html] .

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 [http://www.ukos.ch 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

External links

* [http://www.k-team.com Homepage] - K-Team, the company which sells the Khepera robots
* [http://phoenix.inf.upol.cz/~dostal/robots.html The Khepera-Lisp Interface (KHLI)] - library for controlling Khepera from Allegro Common LISP
* [http://diwww.epfl.ch/lami/team/michel/khep-sim/ 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
* [http://www.eng.upm.edu.my/~kmbs/files/hacks/hardware/robot/playerstage/index.html khepera.cfg] - Khepera configuration file for Player Project robot simulator
* [http://freshmeat.net/projects/yaks/ YAKS Project] - Yet Another Khepera Simulator
* [http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Khepera_III_Toolbox Khepera III Toolbox] - A software toolbox for the Khepera III robot

References

* Mondada, F., Franzi, E., Guignard, A. (1999), The Development of Khepera. In proceedings of First International Khepera Workshop, Paderborn, December 10-11, 1999. [http://infoscience.epfl.ch/getfile.py?recid=89709&mode=best PDF] [http://infoscience.epfl.ch/export.py?recid=89709&ln=fr&fm=bibtex BibTex] [http://infoscience.epfl.ch/search.py?recid=89709&ln=fr EPFL Infoscience entry]