When you think of racing, chances are that either horses or something with wheels comes to mind, but that doesn’t have to be the case. Furrion Robotics is working on Prosthesis, a walking mech that it hopes will eventually compete in the X1 Mech Racing League, which Furrion founded. We caught up with the company’s founder and CEO, Jonathan Tippett, on the CES 2018 show floor to chat about Prosthesis, and even got the chance to climb inside.
“My youth was spent mountain biking and snowboarding and riding motorcycles in the mountains of [British Columbia],” Tippett told Digital Trends. “I also had a fascination with excavators, dinosaurs, trophy trucks, dune buggies. You kind of mix that all together at Burning Man and get yourself an engineering degree, and out comes a racing mech.”
Tippett started planning what would eventually become Prosthesis as far back as 2006. He and his friends organized a yearly local competition in Vancouver, BC, based on the show Junkyard Wars. The challenge one year was to build a walking machine, and Tippett’s team successfully built one in just 48 hours. That experience created a team that built a more advanced walking machine called the Mondo Spider, which gave Tippett crucial experience building this type of machine. Eventually, he and his team built a single prototype leg that led Furrion to sign on for a full prototype.
Still, building a machine is just the start. Actually making it move — and quickly at that — is a much trickier problem. While Prosthesis was hardly graceful at first, Furrion posted a video earlier this week that shows it moving much more like something that could eventually race. Eventually.
“We’ve literally just got this machine walking,” Tippett says. “So, the next stage is to increase the walking speed, which is an engineering challenge and a piloting challenge, because no one has walked one of these things before.”
While other companies are investing heavily in A.I., and machine learning will likely play a part in keeping Prosthesis stable and upright, the idea is that it will remain 100 percent human-controlled. “It’s a sport,” Tippet says. “The whole point was to invent a sport.”
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.