In this episode, Abate interviews David Mindell, co-founder of Humatics. David discusses a system they developed that can detect the location of a special tracking device down to a centimeter level accuracy. They are currently developing a device to detect location down to a millimeter level accuracy. This solves a the core problem of localization for robots. David discusses the technology behind these products and their applications.
David Mindell
David co-founded Humatics with a mission to revolutionize how people and machines locate, navigate and collaborate. He is a professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT, as well as the Dibner Professor of the History of Engineering and Manufacturing, and Chair of the MIT Task Force on the Work of the Future. He has participated in more than 25 oceanographic expeditions and is an inventor on 8 patents in autonomous helicopters, AI-assisted piloting, and RF navigation. He is the author of five books, including Our Robots, Ourselves:Robotics and the Myths of Autonomy (2015) and Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight (2008). David has undergraduate degrees from Yale and a Ph.D. from MIT.
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Yariv Bash is the CEO of Flytrex, a drone technology company providing comprehensive, autonomous drone delivery systems that enable any business, from SMBs to e-commerce giants, to integrate instant, autonomous on-demand drone delivery into their offering. Flytrex is an end-to-end drone logistics service. Prior to Flytrex, Yariv was the Founder and CEO of SpaceIL – the Israeli team at the Google Lunar X-Prize competition. SpaceIL’s mission: landing an unmanned spaceship on the moon, for a fraction of the traditional cost. Under Yariv’s management, the non-profit SpaceIL raised more than $30 million.
Andrew Stein is the Head of Robotics & AI at Anki, where he began working on the Cozmo project more than four years ago as the team’s first member. He has contributed to several core systems of the product, including vision, cube manipulation, animation streaming, localization, high-level behaviors, and low-level actions. He earned his Ph.D. from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, and his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Peter Harris is the CEO of HighRes Biosolutions. Prior to HighRes, Peter was VP and Managing Director at Axel Johnson, Inc. He spent most his career as the President & CEO of Cadence, Inc., a high technology medical device manufacturing and engineering firm enabling medical companies to bring better devices to market faster. Peter has been a Visiting Executive Lecturer at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia for over 10 years.
Rick Faulk, CEO at Locus Robotics, leads the executive team and is responsible for overall strategy and execution. He has over thirty years of experience in executive management, sales and marketing for some of the world’s most successful technology companies such as Intronis, j2 Global, WebEx, Intranets.com, Lotus Development, Mzinga, and PictureTel. Rick also currently sits on various boards including INfluitive and Hostway, and is an advisor to a number of early-stage companies.