As far as drones go, the Swann Xtreem Gravity Pursuit is as stripped-down as a bowling ball. It doesn’t contain GPS, or any sort of piloting assistance to aid you in flying. But its $120 price point makes this one of the most affordable mid-sized drones you’ll find, and it’s perfect for those who want to get into the drone hobby without learning to fly for the first time on a $500+ platform.
Higher-end drones do have smart features to make it easy for anyone to fly, but they don’t always work all the time. So learning to fly on the Gravity Xtreem is akin to learning how to drive a stick shift car. You’ll have to be in control the entire time you’re flying, and you’ll also have to correct for wind and even occasional drifting. The learning curve is a bit steeper, but the experience will help make you a better drone pilot when you’re ready to up your game and graduate up to a more advanced multicopter.
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.