A Radar for Industrial Robots May Guide Collaboration with Humans

Working alongside an industrial robot can be frustrating and even downright dangerous. But a new sensing system could make human-robot collaboration a cinch. Humatics, an MIT spinout, is developing an indoor radar system that should give robots and other industrial systems the ability to track people's movements very precisely. This could make industrial systems significantly safer, make it possible to track worker performance in greater detail, and lead to more effective new forms of collaboration between people and machines. "We very much see this enabling robots to live in human environments," says David Mindell, a professor in the aeronautics and astronautics department at MIT, who is the company's cofounder and CEO.