The days of air traffic controllers commanding the skies, and pilots flying by the seat of their pants, may be numbered.
Onlookers at IFA 2015 were amazed at the show put on by a swarm of autonomous Parrot Bebop drones. They flipped, spun, ducked, and dodged, all while performing in close quarters.
As the curtain went up to start the show, a soft whir of rotor blades filled the convention hall. Then the drones took off in sequence and started an aerial acrobatic show akin to what you would see from the Blue Angels. The drones performed in unison, every move synchronized with the music.
The quadcopters were programmed by the coders back at Parrot, and they use tags on the show floor to navigate. We tried to get a sneak behind the scenes to learn more, but the team at Parrot wanted to keep some things secret.
With auto-pilot and GPS guidance already being used in most aircraft, it’s safe to say that with the addition of the technologies displayed here, we could see a show like this put on by full-size aircraft in the future.
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.