Inline skates may have reached their peak in the late-’80s, but go tell that to the folks behind the Rollkers. The French company is looking to bring its peculiar brand of attachable skates to consumers in late 2015, riding the recent wave of sustainable transportation with a futuristic gait once reserved for the likes of Back to the Future and Minority Report.
Recently showcased at the CES 2015 Unveiled, the electronic devices strap to the bottom of your feet, allowing you to move at speeds up to 7 miles per hour by simply walking as you would normally. Rollkers CEO Paul Chavand said travelators, the moving sidewalks typically found in airports, first spurred the concept, eventually culminating in a set of motorized wheels that attach to the bottom of your soles.
Though the latest, working prototypes on hand at CES 2015 are a tad heavier than you would want strapped to your feet, Chavand said the companying is working to lighten the hands-free “under shoes” before officially licensing the product. Nonetheless, the battery-powered devices require little in the way of balancing, nor do they require you to push in the way you would with a traditional pair of skates. Their ability to curb exhaust, smog, and other environmental concerns is only an added plus — so long as you can keep city hall from constantly breathing down your neck for potential violations.
Sadly, mass production seems even further down the road than licensing, as the company is still looking to finalize the concept design before moving forward with production. Pricing and the exact launch date also remain in limbo, but stay tuned for a closer look at the Rollkers when we hit the showroom floor later this week.
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.