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Anthony Downs (Fed)

Mechanical Engineer & Division Safety Representative

Anthony Downs (Tony) has worked at NIST since 2005 on the Urban Search & Rescue Robotics Standards project for DHS, as well as various DARPA Projects including DARPA ASSIST, DARPA TransTac Evaluations, and was one of the main application evaluators for the DARPA Transformative Apps (TransApps) project. He has been part of the team responsible for creating and iterating on the designs of the Emergency Robots Test Methods as they make their way through the ASTM Standards Process, designing the 3D CAD models of the test methods. He was a key player in running the Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) tracking system for both the Emergency Robots project as well as for Data Collections by the ARL CTA project.

Tony is currently the Co-Project Leader for the Agility Performance of Robotic Systems project within the Measurement Science for Manufacturing Robots Program and is the Lead for the Agile Robotics for Industrial Automation Competition (ARIAC), an annual Prize competition currently run in simulation. Tony is also the Division Safety Representative for the Intelligent Systems Division (735), and has recently joined the EL Diversity, Inclusivity, and Belonging (DIB) Council as one of two division 735 representatives.

Publications

Agile Industrial Robots

Author(s)
Craig I. Schlenoff, William P. Shackleford, Zeid Kootbally, Brian Antonishek, Frederick M. Proctor, Thomas Kramer, William Harrison, Anthony Downs
In this chapter, we explore existing robot agility research efforts, while focusing on key technologies that help to enable agility, such as the ones mentioned

Assessing Industrial Robot agility through international competitions

Author(s)
Anthony Downs, Zeid Kootbally, William Harrison, Pavlo Piliptchak, Brian Antonishek, Murat Aksu, Craig I. Schlenoff
Manufacturing and Industrial Robotics have reached a point where in order to be more useful to small and medium sized manufacturers, the systems must become

Agility Metrics in the ARIAC Competition

Author(s)
Anthony Downs, Zeid Kootbally, Craig I. Schlenoff
A thriving manufacturing sector is the essential heart of a vibrant and balanced economy in the United States(U.S.). Small and medium manufacturers (SMMs)
Created February 20, 2019, Updated December 8, 2022