Lifeboat Foundation

The Army has sent at least one “robot dog” armed with an artificial intelligence-enabled gun turret to the Middle East for testing as a fresh counter-drone capability for U.S. service members, service officials confirmed.

Photos published to the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service last…

The Army was testing at least one armed quadrupedal unmanned ground vehicle at an installation in Saudi Arabia.

Continue reading “Army Testing Robot Dogs Armed with Artificial Intelligence-Enabled Rifles in Middle East” »

If you haven’t seen them before, this is Zipline, the world’s leader in last mile delivery drones.

And their whole system is fascinating.

Zipline places docking stations all over a city…businesses can also install them inside, outside, or on the roof of their building.

South Korea’s Hogreen Air reveals the world’s first hydrogen-powered drone with a 5,800-mile remote range at the H2 MEET conference in Seoul.

Robotic exoskeletons are an increasingly popular method for assisting human labor in the workplace. Those that specifically support the back, however, can result in bad lifting form by the wearer. To combat this, researchers at the University of Michigan have built a pair of robot knee exoskeletons, using commercially available drone motors and knee braces.

“Rather than directly bracing the back and giving up on proper lifting form,” U-M professor Robert Gregg notes, “we strengthen the legs to maintain it.”

Test subjects were required to move a 30-pound kettlebell up and down a flight of stairs. Researchers note that the tech helped them maintain good lifting form, while lifting more quickly.

The past decade has witnessed the great success of deep neural networks in various domains. However, deep neural networks are very resource-intensive in terms of energy consumption, data requirements, and high computational costs. With the recent increasing need for the autonomy of machines in the real world, e.g., self-driving vehicles, drones, and collaborative robots, exploitation of deep neural networks in those applications has been actively investigated. In those applications, energy and computational efficiencies are especially important because of the need for real-time responses and the limited energy supply. A promising solution to these previously infeasible applications has recently been given by biologically plausible spiking neural networks. Spiking neural networks aim to bridge the gap between neuroscience and machine learning, using biologically realistic models of neurons to carry out the computation. Due to their functional similarity to the biological neural network, spiking neural networks can embrace the sparsity found in biology and are highly compatible with temporal code. Our contributions in this work are: (i) we give a comprehensive review of theories of biological neurons; (ii) we present various existing spike-based neuron models, which have been studied in neuroscience; (iii) we detail synapse models; (iv) we provide a review of artificial neural networks; (v) we provide detailed guidance on how to train spike-based neuron models; (vi) we revise available spike-based neuron frameworks that have been developed to support implementing spiking neural networks; (vii) finally, we cover existing spiking neural network applications in computer vision and robotics domains. The paper concludes with discussions of future perspectives.

Keywords: spiking neural networks, biological neural network, autonomous robot, robotics, computer vision, neuromorphic hardware, toolkits, survey, review.

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MIT’s soft drone flies and grasps, swiftly picking up a bottle in a demo video:

Interestingly, the drone’s new capabilities allow it to catch objects that are moving at speeds of up to 0.3 meters per second.

Continue reading “MIT’s new drone with flying claws grabs objects mid-air at high speed” »

Three days ago, an old Falcon 9 booster crashed and exploded while landing on a drone ship during its 23rd landing.

The FAA has cleared SpaceX to launch the Falcon 9 while the investigation into Wednesday’s mishap wraps up.

Thank you @LiamVickersAnimation made us such a wonderful animated series, we wish you good luck in your life in the meantime, enjoy the movie of all the epi…

The Korea Institute of Energy Research (KIER) has developed a redox-active metal-organic hybrid electrode material (SKIER-5) for Li batteries that remains stable in cold conditions as low as minus 20 degrees Celsius. By addressing the limitations of graphite as an anode material of conventional Li batteries under freezing conditions, SKIER-5 has the potential to be a superior alternative. This novel material can be used in Li batteries for a variety of applications, including electric vehicles, drones, and ultra-small electronic devices, even at low temperatures.

Currently, graphite is the conventional material used for anodes in lithium-ion batteries due to its thermodynamic stability and low cost. However, batteries with graphite anodes have significant drawbacks: their storage capacity sharply decreases at subzero temperatures, and dendrites can form on the anode surface during charging. This can lead to thermal runaway and potential explosions.

A research team led by Dr. Jungjoon Yoo, Dr. Kanghoon Yim, and Dr. Hyunuk Kim at KIER has developed a redox-active conductive metal-organic framework called “SKIER-5.” This framework is assembled from a trianthrene-based organic ligand and nickel ions. SKIER-5 exhibited a discharge capacity five times higher than that of graphite in subzero environments.