From drones that fire webs to ones able to land vertically on walls, there is no shortage of crazy concept drones out there. Both of these pale into harmless insignificance, however, compared to the latest drone created by Turkish electronics firm Asisguard. What makes the Songar drone so headline-generating? The fact that, unlike regular four-bladed quadcopters, it uses eight blades to enable it to fly. Oh, and the fact that it comes with a mounted machine gun and 200 rounds of ammunition for riddling targets with bullets from the sky. That bit as well.
Anyone who has ever flown a drone will know that piloting one accurately can be a bit of a challenge. That’s one of the things that makes great drone racers or photographers so talented. It’s no surprise, then, that machine-gunning targets from a flying unmanned (but not unarmed) aerial vehicle is a little bit tough. To make up for that, and compensate for recoil, Songar uses cameras and a laser rangefinder to help calculate metrics such as distance, angle, wind speed, and more. It also uses a pair of robot arms to move the machine gun as it fires to lessen the impact of the recoil.
According to a New Scientist article, Songar has sufficient accuracy to be able to hit a 15-centimeter area from 200 meters away. If you’re someone who prefers to measure things in a combination of fruit sizes and sports fields, it’s the equivalent of shooting a mango from close to two football fields away. That distance could soon double due to software improvements. The drone also has night sensors to allow it to see in darkness. It can additionally be deployed in a group of three, which can be made to converge on a target for simultaneous firing. To select a target, all a Songar pilot would need to do is to select them with crosshairs using a screen on a remote control.
Asisguard is planning to deliver its drones for military use before the end of the year. While not the first deadly drone (or even gun-equipped drone) we’ve covered, this certainly looks like a fearsome new entry into a growing market place. For better or worse.
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.