Looking for a way to make summer days spent at the beach a bit more memorable? Perhaps you should consider investing in your very own underwater drone that will let you explore the ocean depth without even having to get your feet wet. That’s where a newly launched Kickstarter campaign comes into play. Called Nemo, it’s an underwater drone that promises to make your next seafaring adventure a whole lot more exciting. And certainly more high-tech.
Created by Chinese startup Aquarobotman, Nemo is capable of descending to a maximum depth of 100 meters (328 feet) beneath the waves at a speed of 3.9 knots, and can be controlled from your iOS or Android mobile device. While it’s doing this, it can livestream 4K/30fps video footage, as well as snap high quality 16-megapixel stills. Using an eight-LED fill light rig, the undersea world will be illuminated with the power of 1,000 lumens for your viewing pleasure. You can even don VR goggles to enjoy the experience as if you were actually there.
“Nemo improves on other underwater drones by using a patented QAS-balance system with a four tandem thruster design that provides the most stable underwater video platform possible,” creator Peng Hou told Digital Trends. “The increased stability and control makes images and video more clear and in focus. All of the other underwater drones cannot compare to Nemo.”
In terms of battery life, you can reportedly expect three hours of power on a single 1.5-hour charge, with the ability to also easily swap out batteries if need be. While we’ll have to get our hands on a unit to know for sure, it certainly sounds like it could be a pretty impressive bit of kit.
As ever, we offer our usual warnings about the potential perils of pledging money to crowdfunding campaigns. However, if you are keen to dip your toe in the water (pun intended), you can head over to the campaign’s Kickstarter page to get involved. Prices for the Nemo drone start at $1,599, a purported $1,050 savings on the $2,599 proposed retail price. It comes with 2x batteries, tether cable, bag, and assorted other accessories. Shipping is set to take place in July 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.