Robots are a contentious topic these days. Some people worry about their capacity to erase jobs (or even humanity), others view them as the latest tool in mankind’s quest to make life and labor easier. The iPal will surely appeal to proponents of the latter view. It’s an adorable, childlike robot built to aid some of the most vulnerable members of society: children and the elderly.
At CES 2018, Digital Trends spoke to John Ostrem, co-founder of Avatarmind, the company behind the iPal, in order to understand what lies behind its cute facade. “It’s a fully functional, humanoid robot with lots of sensors, features, and a number of applications that we’re focusing on,” Ostrem said. The priorities for Avatarmind are children, elder care, and retail operations. The robot runs Android, and users can install apps to customize iPal for their uses.
Standing three-and-a-half-feet tall and made of round shapes, touched with pastel colors, the iPal has a friendly appearance that’s perfect for appealing to kids. Parents can outfit the robot with apps that allow it to teach children, or entertain them with song and dance. The iPal is equipped with a camera, and parents can operate it remotely, checking in on their kids and controlling the robot’s movements.
The iPal can also be useful for helping the elderly, providing companionship and security alerts in case of emergencies. Consumers in the United States can currently buy a developer model, with a consumer version slated for mid-2018.
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.