Khepera mobile robot

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A Khepera III robot at the Georgia Institute of Technology
A Khepera III robot at the Georgia Institute of Technology
The first generation Khepera robot released in 1996
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 served researchers for 10 years, widely used by over 500 universities[1][citation needed] worldwide. It is now outdated, even with its upgraded processor and flash in version 2.0.

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[edit] Scientific impact

The Khepera was sold to a thousand research labs and featured on the cover of the August 31th, 2000 issue of Nature [2]. It appeared again in a 2003 article [1].

A Google scholar search with khepera mobile robots returns 2350 hits [2]. The Khepera helped in the emergence of evolutionary robotics [3][4].

[edit] Technical details

[edit] Original version

[edit] 2.0 Version

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

[edit] 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

[edit] External links

[edit] References

  1. ^ A Google scholar search with khepera mobile robot returns 2200 hits
  2. ^ linked with the article of Michael J. B. Krieger, Jean-Bernard Billeter and Laurent Keller.