Each squad in the Marine Corps will soon have a new member — a quadcopter drone that will be used in everything from training to surveillance to battlefield assaults. The Marines purchased more than 800 drones at the end of 2017 and now they’re rolling out quickly to every squad in the service, according to National Defense magazine
“We never had anything like that even at the company level. It was much higher at the battalion level,” said Lt. Gen. Robert Walsh at an industry conference in Washington D.C. “We’re getting one for every single squad in the entire Marine Corps.”
“They’re going fast. We’re talking about two hundred a month,” he added.
Other branches of the service are experimenting with their own drone programs, as are military forces in other countries. But the full-scale integration of drones down to the squad level is a major development.
Each Marine squad is a 13-man unit, with three separate four-man fire teams headed up by a corporal. The 13th man is the sergeant squad leader. According to DefenseOne, however, some commanders have found themselves short on manpower, needing extra soldiers to help with the new technology.
Walsh is reportedly considering giving each squad a “tech assistant” to handle training and maintenance for the drones. It’s not clear if this will necessitate increasing the size of the squad or merely reassigning duties within existing units.
The drones will be used during field exercises, such as storming a beach, as surveillance tools to scout the terrain and map enemy positions in advance. They will also play an important role in training during downtime as well, with each squad utilizing a “Tactical Decision Kit” to game out various scenarios.
It’s all part of a new philosophy called “How an Expeditionary Force Operates in the 21st Century,” devised in 2016. It’s a high-tech way of preparing soldiers for battle that was devised at the Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms.
The virtual simulations began last year with the Marines’ 2nd Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment. “We put the games into the barracks and they really just started gaming,” said Walsh. “Then we took it the field, we said, ‘Use it with these quadcopters, with the Hololens in order to map the terrain.’”
For a generation of Marines who grew up playing Xbox and PlayStation, the new program may have some side benefits as well by keeping them engaged and out of trouble. “It was bringing down disciplinary problems in the unit,” Walsh said. “Instead of doing other things they’re using this to think tactically.”
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.