Race for AI is making Hindenburg-style disaster'a real risk', says leading expert The race to get artificial intelligence to market has raised the risk of a Hindenburg-style disaster that shatters global confidence in the technology, a leading researcher has warned. Michael Wooldridge, a professor of AI at Oxford University, said the danger arose from the immense commercial pressures that technology firms were under to release new AI tools, with companies desperate to win customers before the products' capabilities and potential flaws are fully understood. The surge in AI chatbots with guardrails that are easily bypassed showed how commercial incentives were prioritised over more cautious development and safety testing, he said. "It's the classic technology scenario," he said. "You've got a technology that's very, very promising, but not as rigorously tested as you would like it to be, and the commercial pressure behind it is unbearable."

In 2024, the "low-altitude economy" was written into China's Government Work Report for the first time [1], and flying robots have been rapidly popularized nationwide. From an environmental perspective, electrically powered air vehicles are attracting growing attention; key technologies include overall configuration design, integrated energy management, and high-efficiency, high power-to-weight electric propulsion [2]. For electric propulsion, mainstream systems use electric motors to drive propellers, but propeller noise is significant and hard to mitigate [3], which limits widespread use in cities--the main arena for the low-altitude economy--and is also unfavorable for silent reconnaissance. Hence, there is a pressing need for a new propulsion approach enabling quiet, fully electric flight. In the 1920s, Brown observed that an asymmetric capacitor under high voltage can generate thrust, known as the Biefeld-Brown effect. A leading explanation is ionic wind: a high electric field ionizes air, and the resulting ions accelerate and transfer momentum to neutral molecules, producing a net airflow (thrust) [4]. Xu et al. first mounted a plasma thruster on a fixed-wing UAV without other propulsion; the gliding distance with the thruster on was five times that with it off, but the maximum range was only 45m and no controller design was provided [5]. Zhang et al. realized altitude control for a micro ionic-wind-powered UA V using passive components, but the wingspan was at most 6 .3cm

Airships, best recognized for their unique quality of payload/energy ratio, present a fascinating challenge for the field of engineering. Their construction and operation require a delicate balance of materials and rules, making them a compelling object of study. They embody a distinct intersection of physics, design, and innovation, offering a wide array of possibilities for future transportation and exploration. Thanks to their long-flight endurance, they are suited for long-term missions. To operate in complex environments such as indoor cluttered spaces, their membrane and mechatronics need to be protected from impacts. This paper presents a new indoor airship design inspired by origami and the Kresling pattern. The airship structure combines a carbon fiber exoskeleton and UV resin micro-lattices for shock absorption. Our design strengthens the robot while granting the ability to access narrow spaces by folding the structure - up to a volume expansion ratio of 19.8. To optimize the numerous parameters of the airship, we present a pipeline for design, manufacture, and assembly. It takes into account manufacturing constraints, dimensions of the target deployment area, and aerostatics, allowing for easy and quick testing of new configurations. We also present unique features made possible by combining origami with airship design, which reduces the chances of mission-compromising failures. We demonstrate the potential of the design with a complete simulation including an effective control strategy leveraging lightweight mechatronics to optimize flight autonomy in exploration missions of unstructured environments.

To meet the demands for ubiquitous communication and temporary edge computing in 6G networks, aerial mobile edge computing (MEC) networks have been envisioned as a new paradigm. However, dynamic user requests pose challenges for task assignment strategies. Most of the existing research assumes that the strategy is deployed on ground-based stations or UAVs, which will be ineffective in an environment lacking infrastructure and continuous energy supply. Moreover, the resource mutual exclusion problem of dynamic task assignment has not been effectively solved. Toward this end, we introduce the digital twin (DT) into the aerial MEC network to study the resource coalition cooperation approach with the generative model (GM), which provides a preliminary coalition structure for the coalition game. Specifically, we propose a novel network framework that is composed of an application plane, a physical plane, and a virtual plane. After that, the task assignment problem is simplified to convex optimization programming with linear constraints. And then, we also propose a resource coalition cooperation approach that is based on a transferable utility (TU) coalition game to obtain an approximate optimal solution. Numerical results confirm the effectiveness of our proposed approach in terms of energy consumption and utilization of resources.

For tracking and motion capture (MoCap) of animals in their natural habitat, a formation of safe and silent aerial platforms, such as airships with on-board cameras, is well suited. In our prior work we derived formation properties for optimal MoCap, which include maintaining constant angular separation between observers w.r.t. the subject, threshold distance to it and keeping it centered in the camera view. Unlike multi-rotors, airships have non-holonomic constrains and are affected by ambient wind. Their orientation and flight direction are also tightly coupled. Therefore a control scheme for multicopters that assumes independence of motion direction and orientation is not applicable. In this paper, we address this problem by first exploiting a periodic relationship between the airspeed of an airship and its distance to the subject. We use it to derive analytical and numeric solutions that satisfy the formation properties for optimal MoCap. Based on this, we develop an MPC-based formation controller. We perform theoretical analysis of our solution, boundary conditions of its applicability, extensive simulation experiments and a real world demonstration of our control method with an unmanned airship. Open source code https://tinyurl.com/AsMPCCode and a video of our method is provided at https://tinyurl.com/AsMPCVid .

During a flight over New Jersey on May 6, 1937, the enormous German airship Hindenburg suddenly engulfed in flames while attempting to dock with its mooring tower. The airship plummeted to the ground in front of terrified onlookers, and in the 32 seconds it took for the zeppelin to be entirely incinerated, 35 people on the airship and one member of the ground crew died. Although a spark of static electricity is assumed to be the cause of the fire, no consensus has been achieved on the subject. Moreover, there should never have been a fire in the first place. The original concept of the infamous disaster included filling the zeppelin with non-flammable helium gas, which the United States had a ban on exporting.

Abstract. Fixed wing and multirotor UAVs are common in the field of robotics. Solutions for simulation and control of these vehicles are ubiquitous. This is not the case for airships, a simulation of which needs to address unique properties, i) dynamic deformation in response to aerodynamic and control forces, ii) high susceptibility to wind and turbulence at low airspeed, iii) high variability in airship designs regarding placement, direction and vectoring of thrusters and control surfaces. We present a flexible framework for modeling, simulation and control of airships, based on the Robot operating system (ROS), simulation environment (Gazebo) and commercial off the shelf (COTS) electronics, both of which are open source. Based on simulated wind and deformation, we predict substantial effects on controllability, verified in real world flight experiments. All our code is shared as open source, for the benefit of the community and to facilitate lighter-than-air vehicle (LTAV) research. https://github.com/robot-perception-group/airship_simulation

Popular science fiction of the early 20th century depicted Venus as some kind of wonderland of pleasantly warm temperatures, forests, swamps and even dinosaurs. In 1950, the Hayden Planetarium at the American Natural History Museum were soliciting reservations for the first space tourism mission, well before the modern era of Blue Origins, SpaceX and Virgin Galactic. All you had to do was supply your address and tick the box for your preferred destination, which included Venus. Today, Venus is unlikely to be a dream destination for aspiring space tourists. As revealed by numerous missions in the last few decades, rather than being a paradise, the planet is a hellish world of infernal temperatures, a corrosive toxic atmosphere and crushing pressures at the surface.

While in previous years we've had public voting for all the startups, running alongside the investor judging, this year it's an opt-in, because many of the startups seeking investment are not yet ready to publicize. Each year the startups get better and better, so we can't wait to see who you think is the best! Make sure you vote for your favorite – below – by 6pm PST, 10 December and spread the word through social media using #robotlaunch2017. BotsAndUs believe in humans and robots collaborating towards a better life. Our aim is to create physical and emotional comfort with robots to support wide adoption.

Amazon's blimps will have company in the sky, according to a new patent revealing that Walmart too wants to develop the aircraft. The discount retail giant has been granted a patent for'gas-filled carrier aircrafts' that would serve as airborne bases for fleets of delivery drones. It strikes similar to the one filed last year by Amazon, indicating that tensions are heating up between the two companies as they compete to dominate e-commerce shopping. Walmart has been granted a patent for'gas-filled carrier aircrafts' that would serve as airborne bases for fleets of delivery drones. Walmart was granted a patent for blimps that would serve as airborne bases for fleets of delivery drones.