Unmanned aerial vehicles controlled remotely by pilots on the ground. Might kill you. Might bring you pizza.
Police in the Netherlands are exploring the use of trained eagles to protect against rowdy, unwanted drones. The birds of prey, after centuries of evolution, are uniquely suited to snatch smaller objects zipping through the air and bring them to the ground in humiliating fashion.
“It’s a low-tech solution to a high-tech problem,” said a police spokesman. “We use the birds’ age-old hunting instinct to intercept and neutralize drones.”
A new study coming out of the World Economic Forum at Davos predicts that artificial intelligence and robots represent the vanguard of a Fourth Industrial Revolution that will destroy more than five million jobs globally by the end of 2020.
The report cites cloud computing, improved battery technology, crowdsourcing, and machine learning as other components that, within five years, will have severe disruptive impact on administrative functions, manufacturing, and transportation.
Read the report here (PDF): World Economic Forum
You’ve heard a lot about Amazon’s plan to have drones deliver your coffee pods every month, but Chinese startup EHang has revealed a new quad-copter drone that can carry humans.
The EHANG184 can carry a single passenger on 23-minute flights at speeds of nearly 62 miles per hour. Passengers can set waypoints for the journey, but the autonomous drone handles the rest of the navigation, take-off, and landing. While you may be dreaming of Drone Uber dropping you off on the roof of the hottest club in town, the likely near-term use is the military using the EHANG184 to deliver injured soldiers from the battlefield to the MASH unit behind friendlier lines.
Sampriti Bhattacharyya, founder of the drone startup Hydroswarm, explain how her company’s autonomous robots will search and analyze the world’s oceans by deploying swarms of small, autonomous robots carrying a variety of sensors. According to Forbes, the Unmanned Underwater Vehicles market is currently at about a $1 billion and is projected to grow to about $5 billion by 2019.
Segway has partnered with Intel and China’s Ninebot to create a little mech to keep an eye on your beloved pet while you’re at work, and more. With voice recognition and the ability to schlep you around — yes, it’s a hoverboard, as well — the unimaginatively named Robot represents Segway’s first foray into smart devices.
Snark aside, the element of potential coolness here is the Robot’s extendability for developers; it has built-in hardware extensions, and there’s a software developer’s kit (SDK), so if you have an idea, more than a beer-fetching app, we hope, now you’ve got a platform to get that idea kickstarted.
Official site: Segway
K Cube Ventures, in which South Korean tech firm Kakao (formerly Daum Kakao) owns a 10 percent stake, is placing bets on Internet of Things (IoT) and online-to-offline services. One of them is the reason why we use the Robopocalypse tag here: It’s investing 300M won (about US$250k) in UVify, a startup building artificial intelligence-enabled drones.
UVify is staffed by a team of mechanical and aerospace engineers from Seoul National University, according to the company, and its goal is to build drones “that can automatically operate without totally relying on humans,” according to BusinessKorea.
“Uvify has technological competitiveness in both hardware and software as it has been devoted to developing autonomous aircraft and robots in the past years,” — Chung Shina, partner, K Cube Ventures
UVify has also raised another 600M won from Korean state-run investment agencies.
Kakao has built a dominant mobile messaging service in Korea, KakaoTalk, but has struggled to gain any traction for that product outside Asia. The company recently bought Path, a US-based messaging service that has been lauded for a great user interface and approach to messaging, but also failed to make a dent in the North American market as Snapchat, Facebook Messenger, and others have established themselves. It’s not surprising to see diversification on Kakao’s part, and AI plus drones are smart bets. Or will end up enabling our doom. Or both.
Aerosense, the recently revealed joint venture between Sony and Tokyo-based startup ZMP, is showing off its new product for the enterprise market, and the thing boasts some sturdy numbers. The VTOL (vertical takeoff and landing) drone allegedly can carry up to 22 lbs, which is roughly the weight of a full-grown poodle, and can zip along at speeds up to 106 MPH, which your poodle wouldn’t recommend. Design-wise, it clearly borrows lines from both consumer quad-copters and from military UAV products.
The introduction of drones that are capable of these kinds of speeds will add to the regulatory dialogue, but the appeal to logistics is enormous – more deliveries, more profit.