Blanche: an autonomous robot vehicle for structured environments

Blanche is an experimental vehicle designed to operate autonomously within a structured office or factory environment. Blanche has been designed with several goals in mind. First and foremost, Blanche is a testbed with which to experiment with such things as robot programming languages, sensor integration/data fusion techniques, i.e. the management of sparse, conflicting, and/or uncertain information, and with techniques for error detection and recovery. Second, Blanche is designed to be low-cost and its dependence on only two sensors, an optical rangefinder and odometry, reflects this. A description is given of the structure of the vehicle and its associated sensors. Experimental results characterizing the accuracy and repeatability of the cart and sensors are presented. A brief description of the obstacle-free trajectory generation and low-level control algorithms are also given