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Category: drones

Underwater robots inspired by nature are making progress, but hurdles remain

Underwater robots face many challenges before they can truly master the deep, such as stability in choppy currents. A new paper published in the journal npj Robotics provides a comprehensive update of where the technology stands today, including significant progress inspired by the movement of rays.

Underwater robots are not a gimmick. We need them to help us explore the roughly 74% of the ocean floor that still remains a mystery. While satellites, buoys and imaging technology can map the surface and the upper reaches of the ocean, we need underwater drones to explore and gather data from the hidden depths.

Radio waves enable energy-efficient AI on edge devices without heavy hardware

As drones survey forests, robots navigate warehouses and sensors monitor city streets, more of the world’s decision-making is occurring autonomously on the edge—on the small devices that gather information at the ends of much larger networks.

But making that shift to edge computing is harder than it seems. Although artificial intelligence (AI) models continue to grow larger and smarter, the hardware inside these devices remains tiny.

Engineers typically have two options, neither are ideal. Storing an entire AI model on the device requires significant memory, data movement and computing power that drains batteries. Offloading the model to the cloud avoids those hardware constraints, but the back-and-forth introduces lag, burns energy and presents security risks.

MIT engineers fly first-ever plane with no moving parts

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Since the first airplane took flight over 100 years ago, virtually every aircraft in the sky has flown with the help of moving parts such as propellers, turbine blades, or fans that produce a persistent, whining buzz.

Now MIT engineers have built and flown the first-ever plane with no moving parts. Instead of propellers or turbines, the light aircraft is powered by an “ionic wind” — a silent but mighty flow of ions that is produced aboard the plane, and that generates enough thrust to propel the plane over a sustained, steady flight.

Unlike turbine-powered planes, the aircraft does not depend on fossil fuels to fly. And unlike propeller-driven drones, the new design is completely silent.

AI, Autonomy, and Scale: Why Elon Musk’s Timeline Will Break Society

Questions to inspire discussion.

🎯 Q: How should retail investors approach AI and robotics opportunities? A: Focus on technology leaders like Palantir, Tesla, and Nvidia that demonstrate innovation through speed of introducing revolutionary, scalable products rather than attempting venture capital strategies requiring $1M bets across 100 companies.

💼 Q: What venture capital strategy do elite firms use for AI investments? A: Elite VCs like A16Z (founded by Marc Andreessen) invest $1M each in 100 companies, expecting 1–10 to become trillion-dollar successes that make all other bets profitable.

🛡️ Q: Which defense sector companies are disrupting established contractors? A: Companies like Anduril are disrupting the five prime contractors by introducing innovative technologies like drones, which have become dominant in recent conflicts due to lack of innovation in the sector.

⚖️ Q: What mindset should investors maintain when evaluating AI opportunities? A: Be a judicious skeptic, balancing optimism with skepticism to avoid getting carried away by hype and marketing, which is undervalued but crucial for informed investment decisions.

Tesla’s Competitive Advantages.

Continue reading “AI, Autonomy, and Scale: Why Elon Musk’s Timeline Will Break Society” | >

Elon Musk on AGI Timeline, US vs China, Job Markets, Clean Energy & Humanoid Robots

Questions to inspire discussion.

🤖 Q: How quickly will AI and robotics replace human jobs? A: AI and robotics will do half or more of all jobs within the next 3–7 years, with white-collar work being replaced first, followed by blue-collar labor through humanoid robots.

🏢 Q: What competitive advantage will AI-native companies have? A: Companies that are entirely AI-powered will demolish competitors, similar to how a single manually calculated cell in a spreadsheet makes it unable to compete with entirely computer-based spreadsheets.

💼 Q: What forces companies to adopt more AI? A: Companies using more AI must outcompete those using less, creating a forcing function for increased AI adoption, as inertia currently keeps humans doing AI-capable tasks.

📊 Q: How much of enterprise software development can AI handle autonomously? A: Blitzy, an AI platform using thousands of specialized agents, autonomously handles 80%+ of enterprise software development, increasing engineering velocity 5x when paired with human developers.

Energy and Infrastructure.

Continue reading “Elon Musk on AGI Timeline, US vs China, Job Markets, Clean Energy & Humanoid Robots” | >

Quantum entanglement could connect drones for disaster relief, bypassing traditional networks

Any time you use a device to communicate information—an email, a text message, any data transfer—the information in that transmission crosses the open internet, where it could be intercepted. Such communications are also reliant on internet connectivity, often including wireless signal on either or both ends of a transmission.

But what if two—or 10, or 100, or 1,000—entities could be connected in such a way that they could communicate information without any of those security or connectivity concerns?

That’s the challenge that Alexander DeRieux, a Virginia Tech Ph.D. student and Bradley Fellow in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, under the advisement of Professor Walid Saad, set out to tackle using quantum entanglement. In short, they used the unique properties of quantum bits, or qubits, as a method of transmitting information.

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