Joe Dinius, Ph.D.

My name is Joe Dinius. I have spent the last 15+ years working as an autonomous systems engineer in the aerospace, automotive, and robotics industries; most of this time spent in research and development. While I cannot discuss what I have worked on professionally over the years, I have worked on a number of interesting side projects whose results and methodologies I share within this personal website.

I have setup this site to be a collection of posts related to ongoing work that I’m engaged in. Once a project reaches a sufficient level of maturity, I will create a writeup that presents the following:

A concise problem formulation
The approach I have taken to solve the formulated problem
Analysis and summary of my proposed solution
Some suggestions for future work

Most posts have comments enabled, and I encourage visitors to contribute their opinions. I only ask that the comments be civil and aligned with the post. You will find links to my social media accounts below, as well as a link to email me. Thanks for visiting!

news

Dec 20, 2023	A new project write-up on building a full stack autonomy capability for a fixed wing aerial vehicle from scratch.
Oct 22, 2023	A new post on state estimation for fixed-wing UAVs is available.
Oct 13, 2023	A new post on flight controllers for fixed-wing UAVs is available.
May 1, 2023	A new post describing my efforts to build the F1TENTH autonomous racecar.
Dec 30, 2021	New post: my retrospective on 2021. Happy New Year!!!

latest posts

Oct 22, 2023	State estimation for fixed-wing UAV
Oct 13, 2023	Implementation of different fixed-wing flight controllers
May 1, 2023	Building the F1TENTH Racecar

selected publications

arXiv

PythonRobotics: a Python code collection of robotics algorithms

A. Sakai, D. Ingram, J. Dinius, and 3 more authors

ArXiv e-prints, Aug 2018

Abs

This paper describes an Open Source Software (OSS) project: PythonRobotics. This is a collection of robotics algorithms implemented in the Python programming language. The focus of the project is on autonomous navigation, and the goal is for beginners in robotics to understand the basic ideas behind each algorithm. In this project, the algorithms which are practical and widely used in both academia and industry are selected. Each sample code is written in Python3 and only depends on some standard modules for readability and ease of use. It includes intuitive animations to understand the behavior of the simulation.
USPTO

Spatiotemporal controller for controlling robot operations

J.W. Dinius, B.K. Pennington, R.C. Voorhies, and 2 more authors

Aug 2023

U.S. Patent

Abs

A robot may include a spatiotemporal controller for controlling the kinematics or movements of the robot via continuous and/or granular adjustments to the actuators that perform the physical operations of the robot. The spatiotemporal controller may continuously and/or granularly adjust the actuators to align completion or execution of different objectives or waypoints from a spatiotemporal plan within time intervals allotted for each objective by the spatiotemporal plan. The spatiotemporal controller may also continuously and/or granularly adjust the actuators to workaround unexpected conflicts that may arise during the execution of an objective and delays that result from a workaround while still completing the objective within the allotted time interval. By completing objectives within the allotted time intervals, the spatiotemporal controller may ensure that conflicts do not arise as the robots simultaneously operate in the site using some of the same shared resource.