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About

F.J. Blanco’s research centers on the computational foundations of robot motion planning, with a particular focus on configuration space (C-space) evaluation for articulated and mobile robots. His major contribution is a general, mathematically rigorous method for representing obstacles in C-space, which he advanced through the application of the Convolution Theorem to transform workspace and robot models into a single, efficient function. This work directly addresses the high computational cost of path planning, and Blanco was a pioneer in identifying and exploiting opportunities for parallelism—both within algorithms and across distributed computing systems—to achieve near-real-time performance. His most cited paper, "A general method for C-space evaluation and its application to articulated robots" (2002, 20 citations), established a formal framework that remains a reference in the field. Beyond technical contributions, Blanco has also innovated in robotics pedagogy, applying action-research methods to improve teaching in computer science engineering degrees. With a career spanning from the late 1990s to the 2010s, his work has been instrumental in making complex C-space calculations tractable, enabling more responsive and capable robotic systems in dynamic environments.