See that unmanned military boat cruising through Chesapeake Bay? That’s a new vessel being created by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) that’s been a breakthrough in autonomous naval missions.
In October, ONR took to Chesapeake Bay to show off its new technology, which uses software, radar, and a myriad of environmental sensors to perform patrol missions with little more than remote human supervision. The Navy’s new “swarmboats” aren’t being developed to replace its sailors and marines, however. Instead, they’re intended to assist in duties that might be too dull or too dangerous.
The ONR’s most recent demonstration involved a fleet of these ships patrolling a large swath of open water. When an unknown ship entered the designated space, the swarmboats collectively determined which would approach the vessel to check if it was a threat; the approaching swarmboat then communicated with the rest of the swarm to get help in tracking the unknown vessel, trailing it if needed. Other ships continued to patrol the area, and updates were sent continuously to a human supervisor nearby.
“This technology allows unmanned Navy ships to overwhelm an adversary,” ONR Sea Warfare and Weapons Dept. Military Deputy Commander, Luis Molina said in a statement. “Its sensors and software enable swarming capability, giving naval warfighters a decisive edge.”
October’s swarmboat demonstration built upon a 2014 demonstration of the autonomy technology Control Architecture for Robotic Agent Command and Sensing (CARACaS), where the swarmboats were tasked with escorting a Navy warship in Virginia’s James River. “The demonstration showed some remarkable advances in autonomous capabilities,” Molina added. “While previous work had focused on autonomous protection of high-value ships, this time we were focused on harbor approach defense.”
For future missions, ONR is looking to equip the Navy with a military force of both manned and unmanned systems. ONR will begin testing these swarmboats for use in dangerous missions wherein extra protection is needed for soldiers. The autonomous boats — designed to swarm enemies — are capable of doing that in great numbers at the fraction of a cost it would take a single manned warship, ONR said.
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.