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Antonio Diaz-Calderon
NREC Commercialization Specialist

No longer a member of RI.

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My research interests are in the areas of mobile robots and sensor-based stability control of off-road heavy-trucks. I am interested in building robots and related systems that will help improving productivity without compromising safety in today's market place.

Off-Road heavy-truck dynamics The goal of this work is to improve the performance of off-road heavy-trucks (e.g., lift trucks) without compromising operator safety. I am interested in the dynamic aspect of the stability of the vehicle. Off-road heavy-trucks have the characteristic that can articulate significant amount of mass. As a result, the dynamic properties of the vehicle change affecting its dynamic stability.

I am working on a system that computes the dynamic stability of an articulated vehicle (e.g., determines unsafe states of motion). The system senses the motion of the vehicle, which includes the motion due to articulation, and computes a stability measure. This measure represents how close the vehicle is to a tipover event and in what direction.

CAD/CAM, computer graphics, control, manipulation, mechatronics, sensor fusion, and sensors

• Advanced Mechatronics Lab - Research on distributed robotics, distributed informations systems, sensor based robotics, and reconfigurable systems.

• Composable Simulation - Software environment which facilitates creating simulations of mechatronic systems
• Distributed Design System - CODES - Providing people, tools, and information for integrated robotics design
• Distributed Robotics Systems - CyberScout - Tactical surveillance collaborative robotics.
• Metaphor - Design for Software Evolution and Reuse
• PerceptOR (NREC) - We have developed a novel semi-autonomous unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) that includes a dedicated unmanned air vehicle - a "Flying Eye" - that flies ahead of the UGV to detect hazards before the onboard UGV sensors would.
• Vehicle Stability Prediction - NREC pioneered an easy-to-implement solution to a serious but frequently overlooked problem — stability margin estimation as it relates to vehicular rollover and tipover vulnerabilities.

Note: This list may not be comprehensive. It contains only those publications in the RI publications database. Entries are listed in reverse chronological order.

• Toward Reliable Off Road Autonomous Vehicles Operating in Challenging Environments
  A. Kelly, A. Stentz, O. Amidi, M.W. Bode, D. Bradley, A. Diaz-Calderon, M. Happold, H. Herman, R. Mandelbaum, T. Pilarski, P. Rander, S. Thayer, N.M. Vallidis, and R. Warner
  The International Journal of Robotics Research, Vol. 25, No. 5-6, May, 2006, pp. 449-483. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [847 KB] copyrighted

• OnLine Stability Margin and Attitude Estimation for Dynamic Articulating Mobile Robots
  A. Diaz-Calderon and A. Kelly
  International Journal of Robotics Research, October, 2005. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [13936 KB] copyrighted

• Organization and selection of reconfigurable models
  A. Diaz-Calderon, C. Paredis, and P. Khosla
  Proceedings of the Winter Simulation Conference, Vol. 1, December, 2000, pp. 386 - 393. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [766 KB] copyrighted

• Combining Information Technology Components and Symbolic Equation Manipulation in Modeling and Simulation of Mechatronic Systems
  A. Diaz-Calderon, C. Paredis, and P. Khosla
  Proceedings of the 1999 IEEE International Symposium on Computer Aided Control System Design, August, 1999, pp. 144 - 150. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [80 KB] copyrighted

• On the Synthesis of the System Graph for 3D Mechanics
  A. Diaz-Calderon, C. Paredis, and P. Khosla
  Proceedings of the 18th American Control Conference, Vol. 5, June, 1999, pp. 3137 - 3141. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [46 KB] copyrighted

• A composable simulation environment for mechatronic systems
  A. Diaz-Calderon, C. Paredis, and P. Khosla
  SCS 1999 European Simulation Symposium, 1999.
  Download: pdf [109 KB] copyrighted

• A Modular Composable Software Architecture for the Simulation of Mechatronic Systems
  A. Diaz-Calderon, C. Paredis, and P. Khosla
  ASME Computers in Engineering Conference, September, 1998.
  Download: pdf [315 KB] copyrighted

• Measuring the difficulty of assembly tasks from tool access information
  A. Diaz-Calderon, D. Navin-Chandra, and P. Khosla
  IEEE International Symposium on Assembly and Task Planning, August, 1995, pp. 87 - 93. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [185 KB], ps.gz [192 KB] copyrighted