Drones are already delivering us pizza and even our impulsive Amazon Prime purchases, so it was only a matter of time before a life-size model made the leap to the burgeoning air taxi market. One company in particular has unveiled its hybrid passenger-carrying model, the SureFly, and the aircraft could take flight as early as this year.
The Ohio-based firm, Workhorse, specializes in everything from autonomous drone delivery systems to hybrid-electric propulsion systems, and the SureFly is the perfect marriage of these technologies. The craft utilizes a carbon fiber fuselage and rotors as well as a fix-prop pitch design (meaning it has no wings, tail, tilt rotor or tilt wings) to minimize the overall weight. As an added design bonus, each of the four carbon fiber arms fold-down for convenient storage.
The Surefly can travel up to 70 miles on a single tank of fuel, with a top speed of 70 miles per hour. To get airborne, it relies on eight independent motors, each driving a single propeller. For additional safety, the air taxi also packs a backup lithium-ion battery in the event of a fuel shortage or mechanical malfunction.
“That way, if the engine should fail, you have five minutes to get down,” explained chief executive of Workhorse, Steve Burns. “And we even have a ballistic parachute, fired upward, like an ejector seat, so you can be 100 feet up, and it’ll still work. In a normal helicopter the rotor would chop it up, but with eight blades, there’s nothing directly overhead.”
Despite the promising lightweight design and impressive specs, the unit has yet to actually take flight. The SureFly is slated for display at the Paris Air Show at the end of June, however, no test flight is scheduled for that event either. SureFly isn’t alone in this regard by any means. There are plenty of air taxi startups vying for supremacy at the moment, and not a single one of them has fulfilled the rather crucial air-taxi capacity of transporting a human being to work. The maiden SureFly voyage is expected later this year.
If the SureFly does ever actually take flight and receive FAA approval, Workhorse sees a host of other potentially useful applications for the unit, ranging from agriculture to faster first-responder deployment. The company has yet to place a specific price tag on the SureFly, but Burns has stated that the units will sell for under $200,000. Eventually, he hopes to price the SureFly in the same bracket as a Tesla. Until then, we’ll just have to hold our breath, or not.
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.