RAVON — The Robust Autonomous Vehicle for Off-road Navigation

With the aim of developing a vehicle that can fully autonomously operate in highly vegetated terrain, the University of Kaiserslautern’s Robotics Research Lab is conducting research in the field of off-road robotics. Their platform RAVON is a 4WD vehicle equipped with a large number of different sensor systems, which are used as basis for the hazard detection. RAVON’s navigation system is three-layered, consisting of a deliberative navigator on top of a behaviour-based pilot. The navigator’s job is to create and update topological maps of the robot’s environment, in which paths are calculated. The pilot tries to move the robot along such paths while keeping it away from obstacles. Collision avoidance is realised by a large number of behaviours that access the sensor data in a unified and straightforward way. An intermediate layer shall mediate between navigator and pilot and solve problems they cannot address properly. The purpose of this paper is to provide information about the platform RAVON and to present the concepts underlying the work in detail.