In February 2017, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos shared details of the company’s plans to ship products via drone, a service that’s been dubbed Prime Air. Now, a newly awarded patent has offered up some extra information on how this new delivery process will work in practice.
On Monday, Amazon was awarded a patent for a shipping label with a built-in parachute, according to a report from GeekWire. This innovative idea would allow drones to deliver packages without having to land, with the package falling to the ground safely thanks to the parachute, making the delivery process much more efficient.
The shipping label wouldn’t look out of the ordinary until called into action, but a system of cords, a breakaway cover, and the all-important parachute would be hidden away under the surface. The patent also mentions that extra components like a harness to keep things in place, sensors to make sure it lands in the correct spot, and a shock absorber to prevent rough landings could also be employed.
The parachutes themselves would be tailored to the product at hand, keeping with the various packaging options that Amazon currently employs for different products. When larger items are being delivered, more than one parachute could be employed at one time, based on drawings that the company submitted to the United States Patent Office.
Amazon has been researching drone delivery for years — this patent was submitted in 2015 — but it seems that the idea is finally starting to become a reality. With this patent in place, and real-world testing already underway, it’s perhaps only a matter of time before customers waiting on a package look to the skies in anticipation, rather than waiting for the mailman.
Of course, Prime Air isn’t likely to replace Amazon’s other means of delivery completely, at least not yet. The patent application suggests that, while these new shipping labels might someday be applied to every package being dispatched, they’ll be easy enough to remove should ground shipping prove to be a more appropriate option.
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.
Military working dogs charge into places the rest of us would flee. So, I understand why anyone would want to breed tougher, healthier dogs for the job.
Warhound, a new startup from Colossal Biosciences co-founder Ben Lamm and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, has stepped out of stealth with $200 million to clone and gene-edit working dogs for American troops, police departments, and emergency services (via TechCrunch).
AI can describe a picture, identify objects, and answer questions about what a camera sees. But when a blind user needs a quick answer, getting an entire spoken essay about the scene isn't exactly helpful. Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) have found that AI-powered visual assistance can leave blind users doing too much work to get the information they actually need.
The study, titled Say It My Way: Exploring Control in Conversational Visual Question Answering with Blind Users, examined how people interact with Be My AI, an AI-powered feature of the Be My Eyes app. The researchers found that users often received lengthy descriptions that didn't adequately address their immediate goals, forcing them to ask follow-up questions or find ways to steer the AI towards a more useful answer.