The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

Welcome back, Dr Gregory Charvat!

• List of past appearances
  • #115
  • #179
  • #214
• Greg was an easy hire as he’s literally the “guy who wrote the book” on the subject, “Small and Short-Range Radar Systems”
• He is currently the CTO of Humatics
• Greg got started with project based learning – coffee can radar
• He returned and did a stint as a visiting professor with Ramesh Raskar. They developed a camera that allows you to watch microwaves propagate
• Fields and waves vs optics people
• Optics make some approximations that EM people can’t
• Phase coherent processing
• Butterfly Network was a company that developed an Ultrasound module on a chip
• Jonathan Rothberg
• They first developed an ultrasound tomography (similar to a CT scan) but the cost of goods was too high.
• MEMS based sensors, instead of the traditional way of making ultrasound transducers with high frequency quartz.
• Lots of analog parts onto the chip, the hard part was making them manufacturable.
• Greg moved on when funding was secured
• He then went to Hyperfine, another company founded by Jonathan Rothberg but still in stealth mode.
• Built the first machine in 100 days
• Built the next in 4-5 months
• Greg is learning how to hire people
• It costs more to over-analyze than to just start building (sometimes).
• Greg wants to take back the term “Technology”
• You should do a tour in defence because the unlimited budgets leads to cutting edge work.
• Greg moved onto his current role as CTO of Humatics
• David Mindell was a professor at MIT. He also wrote a book called Digital Apollo about the flight computer.
• The Humatics system is a short range, super high precision GPS using microwave transceivers.
• “That should be a piece of cake”
• David worked for Bob Ballard, who is known for discovering the Titanic
• ALVIN
• HDDG talk about deep water by Nic Bingham
• Center for marine robotics conference
• You can see what they see at the control center live via Nautilus Live
• GPS won’t penetrate the water
• Acoustic based navigation system
• Perfect recreation of the titanic
• Gary Cohen does business stuff, James Kinsey is the robotics person
• Ultrawideband company for sale (Time Domain). Didn’t buy the company right away (they did later)
• Demo’d it at MARS – Machine and Robotics Symposium
• Kiva Robotics told Jeff Bezos about the demo
• Build proto in 4 months
• It is centimeter accurate precision out to 4 nines (99.9999% of the time). It has a coverage area of 500m.
• SLAM
• The problem is that things change in a manufacturing scenarios
• Currently there are humans in the loop
• The robot is pinned to a line, which is an absolute system
• For the forthcoming millimeter precision device, it will cover 10 m total
• This will be used for “virtual fixturing” or said another way, “Where does stuff live in the real world?”
• Time of flight uses impulses
• Startups as a career path
• Interested in learning more and/or joining their the teams discussed here?
  • Humatics
  • Hyperfine
  • Butterfly Network