David Mindell has spent his career defying traditional distinctions between disciplines. His work has explored the ways humans interact with machines, drive innovation, and maintain societal well-being as technology transforms our economy. And, Mindell says, he couldn't have done it anywhere but MIT. He joined MIT's faculty 23 years ago after completing his PhD in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society, and he currently holds a dual appointment in engineering and humanities as the Frances and David Dibner Professor of the History of Engineering and Manufacturing in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences and professor of aeronautics and astronautics. Mindell's experience combining fields of study has shaped his ideas about the relationship between humans and machines.

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 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.

The new capital arrives a few months after Humatics announced an $18 million Series A funding round. The Boston-based firm was one of the early companies to participate in the STEX25 startup accelerator program at MIT. (Humatics is another company that has received support from the initiative, according to the STEX25 website.) The Toro Company, the Minnesota-based maker of lawn mowers and other equipment, bought a minority stake in GreenSight Agronomics, a Boston drone startup serving the agricultural sector. Meanwhile, Radian Capital made a growth equity investment in Boston-based retail software company Blueday, which also named former Salesforce executive Graeme Grant as its CEO. The company's founding CEO, serial entrepreneur Dave Balter, shifted to the role of chairman in November in part so he could focus on his latest venture, Flipside Crypto.

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.

Many of the inventors who fueled the digital revolution have become household names. Innovators such as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg all contributed mightily to the technologies that have transformed our daily lives and society. If you're not an engineer, however, you have probably never heard of the brilliant inventor Rudolf Kálmán, a Budapest-born engineer and mathematician who died on July 2 in Gainesville, Florida, at age 86. His fundamental contribution, an algorithm called the Kalman filter, made possible many essential technological achievements of the last 50 years. These include aerospace systems such as the computers that landed Apollo astronauts on the moon, robotic vehicles that explore our world from the deep sea to the outer planets, and nearly any endeavor that needs to estimate the state of the world from noisy data. Someone once described the entire GPS system--an Earth-girdling constellation of satellites, ground stations, and computers as "one enormous Kalman filter."