This paper introduces the autonomous outdoor robot RAVON (see Figure 1) which is developed at the University of Kaiserslautern. The vehicle is used as a testbed to investigate behaviour-based strategies on motion adaptation, localisation and navigation in rough outdoor terrain. At the current stage the vehicle features collision-free autonomous navigation along way points given in GPS coordinates.

Current approaches to local rough-terrain navigation are limited by their ability to build a terrain model from sensor data. Available sensors make very indirect measurements of quantities of interest such as the supporting ground surface and the location of obstacles. This is especially true in domains where vegetation may hide the ground surface or partially obscure obstacles. This thesis pre...

An autonomous vehicle can navigate by measuring the light intensity in a known environment, using a prediction and correction cycle. This navigation method is not trivial, so I developed, implemented and tested two different navigation algorithms. The simple navigation function works well, except at some locations which depend on te light illumination function. The advanced algorithm is slower,...

Modern in-car infotainment and navigation systems will incorporate features from the automotive electronics as well as from the consumer electronics. These domains have very different innovation cycles, with effects on the hardware and software development process. The “Innovation Cycle Dilemma” refers to the difficulty in integrating both domains. This paper describes a platform that proved to...

This paper targets the content selection problem in generating appropriate information in the domain of in-car navigation. It describes an algorithm that models driver’s knowledge about roads and routes and uses this knowledge to tailor turn-by-turn instructions from a commercial routing service to those more suitable to the individual driver’s background. This content selection component is on...

The paper presents a navigation algorithm for dynamic, uncertain environment. The static environment is unknown, while moving pedestrians are detected and tracked on-line. The planning algorithm is based on an extension of the Rapidly-exploring Random Tree algorithm, where the likelihood of the obstacles trajectory and the probability of collision is explicitly taken into account. The algorithm...

The driving factor for the development of the vehicle presented in this paper was to construct a hardware platform that allows to perform the tasks of environment mapping and autonomous navigation in large scale outdoor environments. Our robot is based on a standard Smart car that has been equipped with five distance laser sensors, three cameras, a differential GPS, an Inertial Measurement Unit...

The introduction of homogenous multicore systems for embedded devices in the automotive domain has been started recently. Driver information systems like car navigation are the first application. This paper shows how the software architecture should be designed in order to use the multicore technology efficiently. We will focus on two principles as scheduling algorithms and parallel programming...

Map database for car navigation systems accommodates a variety of urban information such as gas stations and convenience stores to satisfy growing users need. Though map databases are revised once or twice a year, it may not be very satisfactory not only for car navigation services but also for future passenger navigation services, because many new shops are constantly emerging while many of th...