Thinking about getting into the world of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), but don’t want to plunk down too much cash? Well, have we got the drone for you!
Okay, the Swann Quad Starship isn’t actually a drone – there are no fancy autonomous flying modes, on-board cameras, or any of the other futuristic abilities packed into competing devices like the Parrot AR.Drone 2. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t an awesome bit of RC tech for much cheaper than flying robots with similar features.
Equipped with Swann’s Easy Fly Gyro technology, the four-propeller-powered Quad Starship is capable of “performing death-defying turns, dives, flips, tumbles, and stunts” with relative ease, according to Jeremy Stewart, Swann’s VP of marketing. Add in its “powerful” 2.4GHz control, and you get a flight range of up to 330 feet – plenty far for this little zipper.
Unfortunately, Quad Starship’s battery only gives you eight minutes of airtime – which is actually pretty good for a ‘copter of this size, but still not nearly as long as a kid’s attention space. After the charge runs out, you power the sucker back up using a provided USB that attaches to the remote control (which itself is powered by four AA batteries).
This is the first quadcopter from Swann, which specializes in DIY home security camera sets ups, though the company does make a range of RC helicopters, some of which you may have seen feature at your local mall kiosk.
The Swann Quad Starship retails for just $80, and is available from Amazon, Fry’s, Tiger Direct, and B&H.
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.