The Mars 2020 rover is preparing for its big mission by doing some “bicep curls” in a new video released by NASA.
The rover will head to Mars in July 2020 and is scheduled to land on the Red Planet’s Jezero Crater in February 2021. It’s a big mission to prepare for: the rover will collect samples from rock and soil on the planet’s surface. Both will be heavy, so NASA has decided to give its arms a good workout.
The robotic arm is seven feet long and weighs 88 pounds. There’s five electric motors and five joints that mimic the movement of an actual human arm.
The time-lapsed video shows a close-up look at the Mars 2020 rover and its arm working in action.
“This was our first opportunity to watch the arm and turret move in concert with each other, making sure that everything worked as advertised — nothing blocking or otherwise hindering smooth operation of the system,” said Dave Levine, an integration engineer for Mars 2020, in a Jet Propulsion Labratory blog post discussing the video. “Standing there, watching the arm and turret go through their motions, you can’t help but marvel that the rover will be in space in less than a year from now and performing these exact movements on Mars in less than two.”
The Mars 2020 rover will be the seventh to be dispatched to Mars, joining the ranks of Curiosity, InSight lander, Spirit, and Opportunity. The Opportunity rover was the longest-lasting one in Mars exploration history. It roamed about 28 miles of Mars’ surface and was active for 14 years. NASA officially declared Opportunity dead in February.
This new rover doesn’t have a name yet, but NASA has put out a call for K-12 students around the country to suggest names the newest exploration drone.
The hope for this new rover is to be the first to return Martian rock samples to Earth by collecting and storing them for a later mission to come and collect. NASA scientists haven’t figured out if a future return trip mission is plausible yet, but they are gearing the rover up to be able to collect rocks and soil with its beefy robotic arm nonetheless.
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.