Most of us have played a racing video game at some point, and whether it was a full-on simulator like Forza Motorsport 7 or one of those ridiculous snowmobile arcade games with the vibrating seat, you probably felt the thrill of what it’s like to go fast.
Actually going fast is dangerous, though, and expensive if you want to do it safely. Thanks to Fat Shark, you can learn to race with two feet planted on the ground — by utilizing a first-person view (FPV) headset and a microdrone from the Fat Shark 101 drone training system.
At this year’s CES Drone Rodeo in Las Vegas, we spoke with Grant Martin (see above), vice president of marketing for Fat Shark, who gave us some insight into the thought process behind the training kit: “A lot of people have seen drone racing on ESPN or CBS, and they wonder, ‘How do I get into drone racing?’ This is the kit that does that. … It lowers the barrier for entry so you can easily understand [drones] and that you can do it at an affordable price point.”
The hook here is an upgradable system where users can beef up their kit piece by piece. “The Recon headset comes with [the kit], but you can upgrade to a pro-grade headset (Fat Shark offers several different options, which vary when it comes to form factor, display ratio, and field of view) … [The Recon] is the Ford Taurus of headsets, but you can upgrade to a BMW M3,” the company said. Users can upgrade their cameras, quadcopters, and controllers individually (though Fat Shark doesn’t sell copters or radios à la carte), which opens the possibility of incremental upgrades at a few hundred dollars per piece, rather than spending thousands on a new drone all at once.
The system offers three different modes, depending upon the user’s level of expertise. “Easy mode,” for example, automatically stabilizes the quadcopter so you can learn the ropes without fear of the drone accidentally flying away (or crashing and burning). Although the kit is designed specifically for drone racing, beginners could easily have fun just flying around.
We also spoke with Fat Shark CEO Allan Evans, who was nice enough to stop by the Digital Trends CES booth for a quick interview. While drone classes are available, they’re typically aimed at professionals, and can cost thousands of dollars. Evans says that the company saw a need for a simple and comprehensive package aimed at teaching consumers how to fly drones safely and affordably. “It’s important to go through that educational process, because historically it’s been very hard,” he said. The company has invested in step-by-step instruction videos, which Evans sees as vital to making drone flying accessible.
Fat Shark 101 retails for $249 and is available via Fat Shark, as well as online retailers, including GetFPV, Horizon Hobby, and Ready Made RC.
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.