Applications in Academic Research

Khepera was designed for research in mobile robotics from the start.

K-Robots were initially developed for use by multidisciplinary researchers working in the field of artificial intelligence, behaviour studies etc., and thus are well adapted for use in a wide spectrum of research applications:

Evolutionary Robotics

• The MANTRA-LAMI group at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne used our products for experiments in evolutionary robotics.
• The Institute of Computer Science at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland uses Khepera robots with genetic algorithms and genetic programming.
• The School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences (COGS) in the University of Sussex at Brighton is studying artificial evolutionary and adaptive systems using Khepera.

Collective Robotics

• The IDSIA in Lugano, Switzerland works on collective robotics design.
• The LAMI at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne has a mobile robotics group working with Khepera.
• K-Team participated as partner from 2006 to 2010 in the Guardians European research project. The KheperaIII robots were used for the primary scale-down experiments and went also used for testing final scenarios.
  Check Sheffield Hallam University’s page of Guardians project.

Bioinspired Robotics

• The INI in Zurich has implemented a retina chip on Koala. This group also develops an impressive software tool called IRQ421, for the design and test of bioinspired control structures.

Robot Learning

• The Neurobotics Lab of the University of Boston works on operand conditioning.

Process control

• Koala II: a grid solution for fault tolerance in a process control: video. Supélec, France; Univ. of Salermo, Italy

Fuzzy logic

• The use of the KOALA robot as a therapy assistant for autistic kids

Obscacle avoidance

• The locust project – visual collision detection from the Instituto de microelectrónica de Sevilla
  • video of the Koala robot
  • video of the Khepera III robot

Advantages of K-Robots
Why are K-Team products unsurpassed for use research projects?

• Our robots are simple to use. Built to be used by those who may not necessarily have extensive robotics expertise, our robots are simple to use, simple to program (see the long list of compatible software) and well documented.
• Our robots are high-performance and very small, requiring very little area for use. A normal table for a Khepera is the same as a tennis court for a robot 50 cm in diameter! Koala is one of the smallest full terrain robots available!
• Our robots are reliable and can be used by people with little experience in electronics and mechanics.

Each K-Team Product has its own Strengths

• The Khepera is the smallest of our robots and can be used on an ordinary desktop. Its compact size and equally compact price, along with numerous extensions make it a fantastic research tool.
• The Koala is larger, more powerful, and a better platform for implementing custom electronics on the robot, on-board video processing applications, and for rough terrain.
• The KoreBot board is a modular hardware controller which allows the creation of custom robots. The software, hardware and mechanical modularity leave all options open for virtually any research project.