Barbaneta - A Modular Autonomous Vehicle

Abstract This paper presents a small autonomous mobile robot designed and implemented by the authors. The vehicle is modular, in the sense that new functionalities may be added if needed. Therefore, it can be used as a testbed for research and development on autonomous mobile robots. An open architecture was designed and implemented to allow the integration of the different modules. Three modules were implemented in the current stage: motor controllers, guidance control loop and ball catcher/selector. These allow the vehicle to follow an optical track and recover the track if it is suddenly interrupted (using retroreflectors), while collecting and discriminating billiard balls of different colors placed along the path.