Not too long ago, we wrote about a state-of-the-art modular smart home called FutureHAUS made up of plug-and-play modules that use a futuristic linear track system to automatically adjust each room — heck, even the toilet if you want — to each occupant’s individual needs. It might not be the Jetsons, but it still counts as a glimpse of the future in our book.
The students who created it are a whole bunch of big brains from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University who went all the way to Dubai, United Arab Emirates, to compete in the Solar Decathlon Middle East. The Solar Decathlon is an international competition created by the U.S. Department of Energy in which universities from all over the globe meet to design, build, and operate a grid-connected solar-powered house. Out of the 15 teams in the contest, Virginia Tech served as the sole U.S. entry this year.
And guess what? They won the contest, earning a prize equivalent to nearly $250,000.
The win follows nearly two decades of accumulated research and two years of accelerated development, including overcoming a fire that burned down a prototype of the house. It took two dozen students and faculty more than a month in the desert outside Dubai to assemble the house.
“We have the most interdisciplinary team that we’ve ever had around any research project, and that’s what it takes. That’s the secret,” said Joe Wheeler, architecture professor and faculty lead for FutureHAUS Dubai. “That’s the formula to making something this amazing.”
Located at the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park in Dubai this year, the competition offered the challenge of adapting the design to heat, dust, and humidity. The competition required houses to use solar energy as the only energy source and employ technologies that permit maximum energy efficiency. The next Solar Decathlon is scheduled to happen in 2020 to coincide with the Dubai Expo.
One of the keys to the FutureHAUS’ adaptability involves the team’s partnership with Accuride International, one of the world’s largest designers and manufacturers of sliding hardware that has modest roots as a tool and die shop that started in 1962.
Accuride’s contribution is a heavy-duty sliding solution that enables the personalization of the FutureHAUS interior, including kitchen cabinets, bathroom vanities, and toilets that can be raised and lowered for individuals based on advanced recognition technologies. These sensors can adjust the surroundings based on a wide variety of factors including voice, gesture, and proximity detection, as well as fingerprint ID and facial recognition.
The FutureHAUS occupies just 900 square feet but it’s a marvel for the industrial design of modular housing. The home is powered by 50 solar panels, incorporates state-of-the-art technology, and is the result of six years of hard work and innovation by over 100 faculty and students.
The FutureHAUS is the brainchild of Wheeler, who serves as a professor at Virginia Tech’s College of Architecture and Urban Studies. Eight years ago, Wheeler was lauded for his design of another project called Lumenhaus, which won the 2010 Solar Decathlon and earned high praise from the American Institute of Architects.
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.