Power Rangers may not exist, but humans doing battle while inside robots they pilot may soon be a reality. At this year’s CES, Digital Trends spoke with Matt Fidler, chief marketing officer for global technology conglomerate Furrion, about the 20-foot robot suit he wants humans to compete in as part of a racing league like no other.
Furrion debuted the world’s first exo-bionic racing suit — named Prosthesis — at the big gadget show. The suit is a 20-foot tall machine that looks like a large, mechanical spider with no external cover other than the poles that form its body. It is an electric, human-piloted machine that can run two hours on a single charge. The suit’s four limbs connect to the pilot’s body, allowing the machine to mimic the pilot’s motions with startling results.
“It runs at 20 miles an hour. It jumps. It can jump over a whole car,” Fidler told Digital Trends. The first place the world may see the new mech racing league may be at the Robot Olympics. Fidler says Furrion has been in talks with the organizers of Dubai’s upcoming Robot Olympics set for this December, and feels there are “good opportunities to start the racing league at the [Robot] Olympics.”
Fidler attributed Dubai’s ambitious Robot Olympics, as well as the emergence of tech-based sporting leagues such as the Drone Racing League, with inspiring Furrion to want to create a robot suit humans can ride inside.
The racing league may debut in December, but Prosthesis racing talents will be put on display months earlier. According to Furrion’s press release, Prosthesis will make its racing debut at the Furrion Innovation Center and Institute of Technology in Elkhart, Indiana.
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.