Del Castillo, Guillermo

Guillermo completed his MS and PhD degrees in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Notre Dame, USA in 2003 and 2004, respectively. His dissertation, entitled “Autonomous, Vision-Based, Pivoting Wheelchair With Obstacle Detection Capability”, involved work performed with the computer controlled power wheelchair navigation system (CPWNS), an autonomous wheelchair prototype developed at the Dexterity, Vision and Control Laboratory at Notre Dame in collaboration with the Hines VA Hospital in Chicago. The project, the main purpose of which was to provide severely disabled patients with mobility and autonomy, led to a patent (U.S. Patent ref. 6,842,692, Computer-Controlled Power Wheelchair Navigation System, Inventors: Fehr, Linda; Skaar, Steven B.; Del Castillo, Guillermo, granted January 11, 2005).

Guillermo’s work has been showcased in the Chicago Sun-Times ("A step forward for the wheelchair-bound", Technology Section, March 26 2003), Vision Systems Design Magazine (“Ultrasound/vision help handicapped”, Technology Trends, May 2004), The Wall Street Journal (“The robot that does a simple job very well may be wave of future”, Portal Section, June 28 2004), and the New York Times Magazine (Dumb robots are better, December 12, 2004).

Guillermo’s main research interests are digital image processing, autonomous systems, data filtering, and computational modeling. He joined the IT’IS Foundation in early March 2005 as a postdoctoral researcher. He has been working at SPEAG since March 2009 as a scientific modeler and developer for high-performance computing .