16 August 2011 | Print page | 
Allied Vision Technologies Gold Sponsor of Rutgers Students‘ Intelligent Ground Vehicle Project 2012
AVT supports team from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey (USA), for Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition by donating two Manta machine vision cameras for stereovision.
Rutgers' team at IGVC 2011
RU-Navigator vehicle
The local branch of the IEEE association at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey (RU-IEEE) has committed itself to promoting robotics at Rutgers with various exciting projects. One of them is to participate in the IGVC competition.
The Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition (IGVC) is an international collegiate robotics competition that requires each university to build a fully autonomous mobile ground vehicle capable of completing an outdoor navigation challenge. This vehicle must be able to complete three navigation challenges set in a road-like obstacle course riddled with painted lane boundaries, potholes, and various types of traffic barriers. RU-IEEE will be approaching this design and programming challenge with an interdisciplinary team of mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, and computer scientists capable of meeting both the hardware and software challenges inherent in robotics.
A Rutgers team already participated in the 2011 edition with a self-designed vehicle, the Rutgers Navigator. The vehicle is based on a chassis constructed primarily out of a lightweight aluminum framing system. On this chassis are mounted an impressive array of sensors, including a custom stereo camera system for depth perception. The output of these sensors is fed to an on-board cluster of computers autonomously driving the vehicle.
RU-Navigator 2012 Sees With AVT Manta Cameras
The 2012 version of the Navigator will feature significant enhancements compared to its predecessor, including two high-quality digital cameras from Allied Vision Technologies combined for stereoscopic vision. The cameras donated by AVT are Manta G-125C color cameras with GigE Vision interface. The Manta G-125 is a very robust machine vision camera delivering 1.2 Megapixel images at up to 30 frames per second.
“We are very proud to support the RU-Navigator 2012 team and wish them good luck for next year’s competition”, says Michael Cyros, CEO of Allied Vision Technologies Inc., AVT’s North American subsidiary.
Allied Vision Technologies had already sponsored a similar project by donating Guppy FireWire cameras to the Cornell University team who won the RoboSub challenge in 2010. RoboSub is a competition of underwater autonomous vehicles (AUV).