Drones are being increasingly called into action during the COVID-19 crisis, primarily as surveillance tools and mobile speakers to remind people about the importance of lockdown. But there are other use-cases for drones, too. Last month, Digital Trends wrote about how Draganfly, one of the longest-serving commercial drone companies, was working on technology to use drones in the coronavirus pandemic — by utilizing an onboard thermal sensor and smart computer vision technology to allow them to make potential diagnoses from a distance. This could make it more efficient to take temperature readings than the current method of employing devices like handheld infrared thermometers.
On Thursday, March 26, Draganfly announced that it has been chosen and agreed a deal to deploy its COVID-19-sensing drones in Australia. Working with the Australian Department of Defense and the University of South Australia, the Draganfly deployment will see it using its “pandemic drones” to remotely monitor and detect people with infectious and respiratory conditions to help stop the further spread of the disease in Australia. The project has an initial budget of $1.5 million.
Using their onboard tech, the drones are capable of monitoring fever-associated temperature, heart and respiratory rates from a distance, as well as detecting people sneezing and coughing in crowds or places where groups of people may work or congregate.
“The technology itself has not changed in the last month (note: since we published our article on the tech),” Cameron Chell, CEO of Draganfly, told Digital Trends. “But what has changed is our ability to start to talk about the specifics of where and how it was developed as well as its capabilities.”
Chell noted that the drones will be deployed at various hotspots. “Getting the tech into areas where the most amount of detection is currently required is the priority,” he said.
It’s not clear exactly when Draganfly’s drones will be taking to the sky for this purpose. However, given how pressing this unfolding situation is, the sooner this can be done, the better.
In the meantime, Chell said that the company has received plenty of other inquiries about its pandemic drones. “It seems that every market and industry that has been affected by this pandemic has interest at some level,” he said.
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.