Dronemaker Ascending Technologies wanted to celebrate the holiday season in the a special way and came up with the idea of a holiday light show. Bigger and better than your LED blinking holiday lights, the team used one of their signature drones to create the world’s first high-quality drone light painting for the holiday season.
Using the evening sky as its canvas, Ascending Technologies flew their AscTec Falcon 8 UAS drone in a pattern that was laid out in advance using the AscTec Navigator flight planning software. Using the Navigator software, the team strategically placed each waypoint so the drone’s path would create a complex image, such as a reindeer sleigh or a Christmas tree with a star.
To film the flight, each drone was equipped with an LED that provided the paint for the sky, while an A7S Mark ii captured video footage and still images using long-exposure photography of up to 10 minutes. The flights were performed at air speeds of 2 m/s, a velocity that allowed for highly accurate flight and multiple passes through the flight’s predefined waypoints. Santa and the reindeer slight was the most difficult flight with up to 391 waypoints and 10 minutes of footage. The shortest flight was the Holiday Present that took five minutes and involved flying the drone through 68 waypoints.
Once the filming was done, the still shots were combined with the video footage and upbeat holiday music track to create the final presentation. In the end, Assured Technologies created a three-minute clip that will knock your socks off and leave you wanting a Falcon 8 UAS drone in your holiday gift basket. It’s so unbelievable that it looks fake. Assured Technologies goes to great lengths to explain how the footage was captured and even provides two of the original raw long-exposure images of the LED drone flights to prove the films are legit.
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.