Whether it’s heavy luggage or fully laden planes that can weigh in excess of 100,000 pounds, working for an airline can involve shifting some pretty sizable weight. Could robot exosuits help make everything a little bit easier? That’s what Delta, one of the biggest airlines in the United States, is hoping to find out, courtesy of a new partnership with Sarcos Robotics.
At CES, the two companies announced a team-up that will let Delta test out Sarcos’ battery-powered, full-body exoskeletons. These robotic suits, which Sarcos has been working on for years, allow human wearers to lift up to 200 pounds repeatedly for periods of eight hours at a time, without suffering strain or risk of fatigue. It’s one of the first major outings for the Guardian XO exosuit, which Digital Trends wrote about at the end of last year.
“Our partnership with Delta is significant, as they are the first company whose frontline employees have worked directly with our Sarcos team to determine potential use cases for the Guardian XO,” Kristi Martindale, executive vice president of product strategy and chief customer officer for Sarcos Robotics, told Digital Trends. “We will be deploying a Guardian XO Alpha unit in a Delta location during the first quarter of 2020 to give their frontline employees the opportunity to experience the technology in a real-world, on-the-job setting.”
Both Delta and Sarcos will get something out of the partnership. Delta will get to try out the Aliens’ Power Loader-style exosuits in a range of areas, such as handling freight at Delta Cargo warehouses, moving maintenance components at Delta TechOps, and working with ground support.
Sarcos, meanwhile, will be able to see how its exosuit does in a functioning work environment. Martindale said that this will provide, “meaningful data to influence our final product, which will be commercially available to customers in late 2020.”
The Guardian XO suit will eventually go on sale in the third quarter of 2020, with a price of $100,000 per unit. The suits will also be available for rental as part of one of the world’s first “robots-as-a-service” subscription models. After that, you can expect to see it in a lot lot more places. including other airlines.
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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.