Good news, Windows users! Popular drone maker Parrot has partnered with Microsoft to allow you to control the UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) Parrot AR Drone 2.0 quadrocopter with your Windows machine. The new versions of Parrot’s control software include both the Parrot AR FreeFlight app, as well as Parrot’s Audio Suite app, which lets you control the Parrot Zik headphones using a Windows Phone 8 device.
While Audio Suite is available now, the FreeFlight app for Windows 8 won’t arrive until “early December,” according to Parrot. So don’t fire up your Surface tablet just yet. The Windows Phone 8 version of FreeFlight, which will work with applicable Nokia and HTC handsets, is expected to arrive sometime at the beginning of 2014.
The Parrot AR.Drone quadrocopters have been compatible with iOS and Android devices for some time. The addition of Windows arrived after Parrot brought Microsoft’s outgoing CEO Steve Ballmer into the office to try out its high-tech flying robot.
“We have been working for months with Microsoft to ensure the compatibility of Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 devices with Parrot products,” said Henri Seydoux, founder and CEO of Parrot in a statement.
As we saw recently with Instagram, which released its Windows Phone app with a number of key features missing, creating apps for the Windows Phone operating system appears to be a challenge. Hopefully, Parrot AR.Drone users will get the full shebang when the FreeFlight app hits next year.
Want to learn more about getting started in the world of drones? Check out our beginners guide here.
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.