The Khepera is a small (5.5 cm) differential wheeled

mobile robot A mobile robot is an automatic machine that is capable of locomotion.Hu, J.; Bhowmick, P.; Lanzon, A.,Group Coordinated Control of Networked Mobile Robots with Applications to Object Transportation IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, 202 ...

that was developed at the LAMI laboratory of Professor

Jean-Daniel Nicoud Jean-Daniel Nicoud (born 31 August 1938), is a Swiss computer scientist, noted for inventing of a computer mouse with an optical encoder and the CALM (Common Assembly Language for microprocessors). He obtained a degree in physics at the Éco ...

at EPFL (

Lausanne Lausanne ( , , , ) ; it, Losanna; rm, Losanna. is the capital and largest city of the Swiss French speaking canton of Vaud. It is a hilly city situated on the shores of Lake Geneva, about halfway between the Jura Mountains and the Alps, and fac ...

, Switzerland) in the mid 1990s. It was developed by Edo. Franzi,

Francesco Mondada Francesco Mondada (born 17 March 1967) is a Swiss professor in artificial intelligence and robotics. He got a Master's degree in Microengineering at the EPFL in 1991 and a PhD degree in 1997. He is one of the creators of the Khepera and directed ...

, 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 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 Nature, in the broadest sense, is the physical world or universe. "Nature" can refer to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. The study of nature is a large, if not the only, part of science. Although humans ar ...

. It appeared again in a 2003 article. The Khepera helped in the emergence of

evolutionary robotics Evolutionary robotics is an embodied approach to Artificial Intelligence (AI) in which robots are automatically designed using Darwinian principles of natural selection. The design of a robot, or a subsystem of a robot such as a neural controller, ...

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 Ram, ram, or RAM may refer to: Animals * A male sheep * Ram cichlid, a freshwater tropical fish People * Ram (given name) * Ram (surname) * Ram (director) (Ramsubramaniam), an Indian Tamil film director * RAM (musician) (born 1974), Dutch ...

* 512 KB

EEPROM EEPROM (also called E2PROM) stands for electrically erasable programmable read-only memory and is a type of non-volatile memory used in computers, usually integrated in microcontrollers such as smart cards and remote keyless systems, or as ...

* Running µKOS RTOS * 2 DC brushed servo motors with

incremental encoder An incremental encoder is a linear or rotary electromechanical device that has two output signals, ''A'' and ''B'', which issue pulses when the device is moved. Together, the ''A'' and ''B'' signals indicate both the occurrence of and direction o ...

s * 8

infrared Infrared (IR), sometimes called infrared light, is electromagnetic radiation (EMR) with wavelengths longer than those of visible light. It is therefore invisible to the human eye. IR is generally understood to encompass wavelengths from aroun ...

proximity and ambient light sensors (SFH900)

2.0 Version

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

Version 4

* 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

;Notes * Mondada, F., Franzi, E., Guignard, A. (1999), ''The Development of Khepera''. In proceedings of First International Khepera Workshop, Paderborn, 10–11 December 1999
PDFBibTexEPFL Infoscience entry

External links

Homepage
– K-Team, the company which sells the Khepera robots {{DEFAULTSORT:Khepera Mobile Robot Prototype robots Differential wheeled robots Robots of Switzerland Micro robots Educational robots 1991 robots