Khepera mobile robot

The Khepera is a small (5.5 cm) differential wheeled mobile robot that was developed at the LAMI laboratory of Professor Jean-Daniel Nicoud at EPFL (Lausanne, Switzerland) in the mid 1990s. 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.^[1]^{[full citation needed]} It appeared again in a 2003 article.^[2]

The Khepera helped in the emergence of evolutionary robotics.^{[citation needed]}

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

3.0 Version

800 MHz ARM Cortex-A8 Processor
Weight: 540g
256 MB RAM
512 MB plus additional 8GB for data
Battery: 7.4V Lithium Polymer, 3400mAh

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

^ "Volume 406 Issue 6799, 31 August 2000". nature.com. 31 August 2000. Retrieved 14 July 2021.
^ Verschure, Paul F. M. J.; Voegtlin, Thomas; Douglas, Rodney J. (October 2003). "Environmentally mediated synergy between perception and behaviour in mobile robots". Nature. 425 (6958): 620–624. Bibcode:2003Natur.425..620V. doi:10.1038/nature02024. ISSN 1476-4687. PMID 14534588. S2CID 4418697.

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 Archived 6 July 2011 at the Wayback Machine EPFL Infoscience entry

External links

Homepage – K-Team, the company which sells the Khepera robots

[1] "Volume 406 Issue 6799, 31 August 2000". nature.com. 31 August 2000. Retrieved 14 July 2021.

[2] Verschure, Paul F. M. J.; Voegtlin, Thomas; Douglas, Rodney J. (October 2003). "Environmentally mediated synergy between perception and behaviour in mobile robots". Nature. 425 (6958): 620–624. Bibcode:2003Natur.425..620V. doi:10.1038/nature02024. ISSN 1476-4687. PMID 14534588. S2CID 4418697.

[1]

[2]