Snowboarding’s new mod is getting a lot of attention. Drone builder and Youtuber Valplushka has been touted as introducing the sport to the world in one of his posted videos. That’s not exactly true. A YouTuber by the name of Kaspars Balamovskis posted an arguably more awesome adult version of the same thing just the day before, with the intention of testing a drone specifically for board sports. But regardless of who came up with the idea first, the fact of the mater is that droneboarding is officially here, and with it a new age of action sports.
It’s snowboarding with a drone tow instead of a snowmobile, or perhaps, cold-weather kiteboarding on land. In Valplushka’s video from “Soviet Russia, where drone flies you,” the drone doing the towing is a 4 lb quadrocopter that would probably last about ten minutes if it wasn’t trying to drag a small child. This setup is slower than being towed by two constipated sled dogs — but it’s still a killer proof of concept.
By comparison, Balamovskis’ video from the preceding day features an Aerones drone pulling a full grown man. The Latvian unmanned aerial vehicle developer claims a lifting force of 37 kg (81 lbs), which they assert “is more than enough to tow a snowboarder, skateboarder, longboarder or any other similar type of board sport activist,” in a press release featuring the video. The company is looking for a partner to design a drone handlebar system.
Viewers are chiming in all over the Internet. Comments on both videos suggested a boarder carry a large battery attached to the drone with a breakaway connection in case the rider falls. The breakaway battery backpack concept and handlebar system are just the first of the modifications needed for the new sport or sports to come. For example, a drone used for surfing should at the least have floating outrigging.
But the most obvious necessity is, as Jeremy Clarkson would say, “Power!” Both of the videos showed the riders on a slight downward slope, and neither drone setup had the power necessary to really carve up the snow. Eighty pounds of lifting force is impressive, but not quite enough to tow a person up a reasonably steep hill.
Droneboarding will likely hit its full potential as drones get more powerful, but why wait? Current tech shouldn’t stop the truly determined from harnessing a bunch of existing networked drones. Even running two of those Aerones like a team of Clydesdales would likely give you a considerable boost in power.
At this point, we’re just waiting for some intrepid drone masters to expand on this idea and bring it to other sports. Where’s the dronesurfing, dronesledding, droneblading, or droneskating vids? We’re waiting, Internet.
San Francisco startup Dimensional advertised for people to walk robot dogs through city streets. The New York Times reported that the job could include carrying a roughly 33-pound robot back to the office if it overheated. A lift home is an awkward requirement for a labor-saving machine.
Keeping the hardware running is only one challenge. Anthropic's robotics tests found that language models mostly failed when controlling joints directly, but did better when directing trained controllers. Giving an AI agent a body doesn't teach it to handle ordinary household objects.
Soon, a mattress protector may be more than a bed cover. Australian medtech company Sleeptite and researchers at RMIT University have received a US patent for FlexiSense, a smart bedding technology that tracks body position and posture to help caregivers identify when older residents may be at risk of falling.
The technology is being developed for Sleeptite’s in-bed monitoring system, REMi, and was recently on display at The MedTech Conference in Boston. A peer-reviewed study in Flexible and Printed Electronics says the sensors can also be made at scale without sacrificing performance or durability.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.