Detecting landmines is no easy task, but thankfully, a team of researchers at the Arizona State University is developing a fleet of robotic turtles to locate (and detonate) them in the desert.
Every year, an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 people are killed or maimed by landmines, according to UNICEF. Militaries around the globe currently use an array of both low- and high-tech approaches to remove them — ranging from rudimentary metal detectors and trained bomb-sniffing dogs, to sophisticated (and wildly expensive) minesweeping droids.
But these newly developed robo-reptiles have many distinct advantages over current land mine removal methods. The robotic turtles are rather small — about “half the size of a drone” according to a report by New Scientist. Each unit is laser-cut from sheets of cardboard and then folded, origami-style, into a shape designed to accommodate a computer chip, motor, and fins. From start to finish, the entire process takes about three hours.
Unlike bomb-sniffing dogs, these robotic turtles have the ability to work independently in the field. Seeing as the current prototypes are intended for use all over the globe, researchers are programming them with algorithms that allow them to react and adjust to different environment. While a specific type of motion may be preferential in one desert, another region with varying sand grains and/or wet terrain might require a different approach.
The meticulous work of pinpointing landmines in the field in painstaking work with zero margin for error and dire consequences if things go awry. That said, these robot turtles cost roughly $80 each, so losing one unit in the field isn’t going to break the bank.
Joint leader of the ASU team behind the project, Heni Ben Amor, envisions a future in which a fleet of nearly 100 robotic turtles could comb the desert for mines and then tag each device for extraction. Amor will present his research at a pair of robotic conferences in July.
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.
Military working dogs charge into places the rest of us would flee. So, I understand why anyone would want to breed tougher, healthier dogs for the job.
Warhound, a new startup from Colossal Biosciences co-founder Ben Lamm and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, has stepped out of stealth with $200 million to clone and gene-edit working dogs for American troops, police departments, and emergency services (via TechCrunch).
AI can describe a picture, identify objects, and answer questions about what a camera sees. But when a blind user needs a quick answer, getting an entire spoken essay about the scene isn't exactly helpful. Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) have found that AI-powered visual assistance can leave blind users doing too much work to get the information they actually need.
The study, titled Say It My Way: Exploring Control in Conversational Visual Question Answering with Blind Users, examined how people interact with Be My AI, an AI-powered feature of the Be My Eyes app. The researchers found that users often received lengthy descriptions that didn't adequately address their immediate goals, forcing them to ask follow-up questions or find ways to steer the AI towards a more useful answer.