For us land dwellers, what happens beneath the waves is the kind of mystery only aquariums and the Discovery Channel can reveal – until now.
Meet OpenROV, a remotely-controlled mini-submarine that at $850 will cost you less that a (fully decked-out) iPad Air, and allows you to navigate the depths from the comfort of a boat. More than just a robotic submarine, OpenROV is a fully open-source “DIY” device that’s built and improved upon by a community of users. All the software, CAD files of its design, and more are posted online for users to tweak as they see fit.
OpenROV creators Eric Stackpole and David Lang, who raised money for the project through Kickstarter, say they created the gizmo as a way to allow anyone to explore the oceans in ways that usually require multi-million dollar grants (or cable TV production budgets) and teams of people.
“If you think about ocean exploration right now, it’s something that a lot of people think, ‘Oh, well, you know, what that’s something that professional scientists do, that National Geographic explorers do. That’s not something that I get to do,’ ” Lang told CNN. But Lang and Stackpole say OpenROV is their way of “trying to instill back in everyone” a sense that the oceans are theirs to explore, too.
Technically speaking, OpenROV is not really a drone because you must constantly control where it goes, making it more akin to an aquatic RC car than a unmanned areal vehicle, which flies according to pre-program coordinates. But whatever – underwater drone sound much cooler than underwater “remotely operated vehicle,” which is what the whole “ROV” in its name stands for.
The OpenROV v2.5 kit comes with everything you need to build your own ocean explorer, including an HD video camera, batteries, wire tether, and the user interface that you access via your Web browser. Buyers can also choose to purchase just the shell of the device, which can be packed with other components.
Check out a video of the OpenROV in action:
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.