Startup Gelsight hones measurement system that could speed up aerospace work
Share to linkedin... [+]The human finger is incredibly sensitive, with a dense array of receptors in the tip that allow us to feel features as small as nanometers. When Kimo Johnson visited aerospace companies that machine metal parts, he learned that many were relying on experienced workers to conduct a “fingernail test” to quickly judge whether a surface defect was just a small scratch or deep enough to potentially compromise the part.
While the 42-year-old Johnson hopes aerospace will be Gelsight’s breakthrough application, in the nine years since he co-founded the company based on his postdoctoral work at MIT, benchtop versions of its technology have been used for a wide array of tasks, including by Harvard researchers to map fish scales and cosmetics developers to measure how well a product filled in wrinkles.
“The concept was what would it look like if you had a camera inside your skin and you could see when something’s poking into your skin,” says Johnson, who joined Adelson’s lab as a post-doctoral fellow in 2008 after earning a Ph.D. in computer science from Dartmouth. A cellphone manufacturer in China offered a bigger opportunity in mass production, asking Gelsight in 2015 to make a system that could check whether components like metal buttons were the right size. That led Johnson to an epiphany.
“Now rather than a single customer we’ve got the entire aerospace market, and that gives us a much better ability to grow the company,” Johnson says.
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