The Khepera is a small differential wheeled

Differential wheeled robot

A differential wheeled robot is a mobile robot whose movement is based on two separately driven wheels placed on either side of the robot body...

 mobile robot

Autonomous robot

Autonomous robots are robots that can perform desired tasks in unstructured environments without continuous human guidance. Many kinds of robots have some degree of autonomy. Different robots can be autonomous in different ways...

 that was developed at the LAMI laboratory of Prof. Jean-Daniel Nicoud

Jean-Daniel Nicoud

Jean-Daniel Nicoud , is a Swiss computer scientist, noted for inventing of a computer mouse with an optical encoder and the CALM Common Assembly Language for microprocessors....

 at EPFL (Lausanne

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....

) in the mid '90s

1990s

File:1990s decade montage.png|From left, clockwise: The Hubble Space Telescope floats in space after it was taken up in 1990; American F-16s and F-15s fly over burning oil fields and the USA Lexie in Operation Desert Storm, also known as the 1991 Gulf War; The signing of the Oslo Accords on...

. It was developed by Edo. Franzi, Francesco Mondada

Francesco Mondada

Francesco Mondada is a Swiss researcher in artificial intelligence and robotics. He is one of the creators of the Khepera, the S-bot and the e-puck mobile robots. He got a Master's degree in Microengineering at the EPFL in 1991 and a Ph.D. degree in 1997.He was the director of from its creation...

, André Guignard

André Guignard

André Guignard is a Swiss engineer initially educated as a watchmaker. He is the creator of the mechanic of the Khepera, the S-bot and several other mobile robots....

 and others.

Small, fast, and architectured around a Motorola 68331, it served researchers for 10 years, widely used by over 500 universities 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 It is now outdated, even with its upgraded processor and flash in version 2.0.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 August 31st, 2000 issue of Nature

Nature (journal)

Nature, first published on 4 November 1869, is ranked the world's most cited interdisciplinary scientific journal by the Science Edition of the 2010 Journal Citation Reports...

. 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 3400 hits http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=khepera+mobile+robot. The Khepera helped in the emergence of evolutionary robotics

Evolutionary robotics

Evolutionary robotics is a methodology that uses evolutionary computation to develop controllers for autonomous robots. Algorithms in ER frequently operate on populations of candidate controllers, initially selected from some distribution. This population is then repeatedly modified according to...

 http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/5283.htmlhttp://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/112793.html.

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
  Freescale CPU32
  The Freescale 683xx is a family of compatible microcontrollers that use a Freescale 68000-based CPU core. The family was designed using a Hardware Description Language, making the parts synthesizable, and amenable to improved fabrication processes, such as die shrinks.There are two CPU cores used...
  
   CPU @ 16 MHz
• 256 KB RAM
  Ram
  -Animals:*Ram, an uncastrated male sheep*Ram cichlid, a species of freshwater fish endemic to Colombia and Venezuela-Military:*Battering ram*Ramming, a military tactic in which one vehicle runs into another...
  
  
• 512 KB EEPROM
  EEPROM
  EEPROM stands for Electrically Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory and is a type of non-volatile memory used in computers and other electronic devices to store small amounts of data that must be saved when power is removed, e.g., calibration...
  
  
• Running µKOS RTOS
• 2 DC brushed servo motors
  Electric motor
  An electric motor converts electrical energy into mechanical energy.Most electric motors operate through the interaction of magnetic fields and current-carrying conductors to generate force...
  
   with incremental encoders
• 8 infrared
  Infrared
  Infrared light is electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength longer than that of visible light, measured from the nominal edge of visible red light at 0.74 micrometres , and extending conventionally to 300 µm...
  
   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

• 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
  Webots
  Webots is a professional robot simulator widely used for educational purposes.The Webots project started in 1996, initially developed by Dr. Olivier Michel at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland....
  
   - 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
  Player Project
  The Player Project is a project to create free software for research into robotics and sensor systems . Its components include the Player network server and Stage and Gazebo robot platform simulators...
  
  robot simulator - 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