The RAVON Team is part of the Robotics Research Laboratory at the Kaiserslautern University of Technology. The work group was founded in April 2003. Today eight research assistants work under the leadership of Prof. Dr. Karsten Berns.
The outdoor platform developed in the lab is called RAVON (Robust Autonomous Vehicle for Offroad Navigation - agrosy.informatik.uni-kl.de/en/gallery/ravon/) and is based on the RobuCar TT platform by robosoft (http://www.robosoft.fr/). The vehicle's battery-driven 4WD utilises four independent motors. Front and rear axis can be controlled independently by linear motors to allow for advanced steering manoeuvres. As visual sensor systems a 2D Sick (http://www.sick.de/de/de.html) laser scanner and a custom-built stereo camera head have been mounted. For localisation purposes an inertial measurement unit and a GPS receiver have been integrated with the vehicles odometry. Equipped with an industrial PC the robot is able to move fully autonomous.
The robot's behaviour-based control system is implemented based on the open source C++ control software framework MCA2 (Modular Controller Architecture 2 - mca2.sourceforge.net) which is developed at the FZI in Karlsruhe (Forschungszentrum Informatik – www.fzi.de/).
The development of RAVON was started in the year 2004. Currently the vehicle realizes several behaviours guiding it through rough terrain on different test courses.
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