If the authorities and the U.S. Postal Service have their way, the hoverboard might be a thing of the past. Thankfully, faulty batteries and the occasional explosion don’t seem to bother Segway or Intel, considering the two companies premiered a robotic assistant during Intel’s forward-thinking keynote address at CES 2016 in Las Vegas.
Intel showcased the extendable, ridable robot — dubbed the Segway Robot, for now — alongside forthcoming consumer drones and a chipset built specifically for wearables, among other things. It rolled onto the stage with an adorable expression that could rival that of a newborn infant, capitalizing on Intel’s RealSense RGB-D camera, which imbues the self-balancing device with a greater sense of spatial depth when tracking and mapping. Intel’s Atom processor makes it all possible, as does the hardware’s GPU acceleration and embedded vision algorithms.
Intel wasn’t alone in the effort, though. The robot represents a partnership between the behemoth tech giant and Xiaomi, the recent acquirer of Segway and the manufacturer of the Ninebot. The collaboration involves a wealth of technology — including voice capabilities, a livestreaming camera, and facial-recognition — which in combination allowed the robot to navigate around Intel’s mock living room and communicate with its inventor like something out of the waste-covered world of WALL-E.
Segway supposedly has plans to make the Segway Robot commercially available sometime next year, but a developer kit is slated to launch in the second half of 2016 at an undisclosed price. The kit will give developers access to its open-source SDK, allowing them to develop new applications for the robot before it’s readily available. Unfortunately, we doubt very many developers will be able to tackle the challenges that accompany a pair of arms that tout the mobility of a Lego figurine. I guess the future will have to wait.
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.