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. This paper describes 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.