KITE: The Khepera Integrated Testing Environment

This article describes an integrated environment developed for the evaluation of localization and navigation algorithms for mobile robots. The integrated environment, named KITE, superimposes spatial information obtained from the robot and its sensors, upon an overhead view of the robot’s environment. Using the overhead view as the common coordinate system, KITE creates an ideal test-bed in which navigation and localization algorithms can be visually and quantitatively evaluated in real time. A visual object localization system, which consists of a segmentation and a localization module, developed in KITE is also presented. The segmentation module automatically detects and segments colored objects in real-time, transforming the camera into a simple visual sensor for the Khepera platform. The localization module localizes the objects based on the change in the size of them while the robot is moving. The usefulness of KITE is demonstrated through two experiments. First, the drift in the odometric dead-reckoning of the Khepera is shown. Then the performance of the visual object localization system is evaluated. The visual and quantitative results of this evaluation are presented.