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Special Delivery: Zipline catapults its drones into the sky to deliver blood products to hospitals across Rwanda. The drones drop their cargo by parachute.Gif: IEEE Spectrum
Rwanda is known as the land of a thousand hills, and our car seems to go over every one of them as we drive from the small town of Muhanga to the even smaller town of Kinazi. The 50-kilometer trip into western Rwanda will take us well over an hour. We’re on our way to rendezvous with a blood-carrying drone that will make the trip in under 14 minutes.
The drone is operated by Zipline, a California-based company focused on delivering medical supplies in areas with poor infrastructure. And not long after we arrive at Kinazi’s hospital, the fixed-wing drone materializes out of the blue. In a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment, the drone descends, opens a set of doors in its belly, and drops a small package that parachutes to the ground. The drone immediately begins to climb and vanishes over the hills as a staff member crosses the hospital parking lot to pick up the package—a shipment of blood ordered by WhatsApp less than half an hour earlier.
We then climb back into our car to start our bone-jarring return drive to Muhanga, one of Zipline’s launch sites, winding our way over dirt roads. By the time we make it back, the drone is flying smoothly toward another hospital elsewhere in Rwanda, with a fresh package of blood in its belly.
Delivery by drone is a futuristic idea that has caught the public’s imagination, and there are plenty of attempts to turn it into a commercial reality. Amazon, Google, and Domino’s Pizza have all pulled off carefully controlled demonstrations and pilot projects, delivering items such as sunscreen, burritos, and (of course) pizza to backyards and fields. But the world is waiting to see whether any company can find a business model that makes drone delivery a sustainable and profitable endeavor.
The answer may be here in Rwanda, where Zipline is delivering blood to 25 hospitals and clinics across the country every day. Zipline is betting that transporting lifesaving medical supplies, which are often lightweight and urgently needed, will be the killer app for delivery drones.
We visited Zipline’s Rwanda operations to understand the technical challenges of building a drone-based delivery service. We found obsessively engineered drones that the company has optimized for blood delivery, along with a detailed plan for integrating them into the country’s medical system. Zipline’s methods could be a model for Africa, as the company’s founders expand their drone services into other countries on the continent this year. But despite the company’s technological and logistical successes thus far, Zipline still has to prove that it can scale up its operations—that it can go big enough to match its soaring ambitions.
When an order for blood comes in, it takes only 10 minutes for Zipline’s staff to prepare the package and launch a drone.
Rwanda has modernized rapidly since the 1990s, when the country began its recovery from civil war and genocide. The change has been remarkable: Since 2000, the percentage of the population living below the poverty line has dropped from 59 to 39 percent, and life expectancy has increased by nearly 20 years. The government’s Vision 2020 national development plan emphasizes technology infrastructure, and fiber-optic cables now run alongside main roads. More than 95 percent of the population is covered by 4G cellular networks.
The government has also invested heavily in health care. But its push to construct hospitals and clinics has resulted in some shiny new medical facilities opening their doors to patients before the roads leading to them have been improved. Traffic is slow on the two-lane highways that twist around the hills, while the roads that branch off toward small towns soon turn into dirt.
For hospitals in need of critical medical supplies, Rwanda’s roads pose a real problem. Hospital administrators worry most about blood and blood products, which have a short shelf life and strict storage requirements. It’s also difficult to predict how many packs of each blood type will be needed at a given facility, and when. In an emergency, it can take up to 5 hours for a Rwandan hospital to receive a blood delivery via road, which could easily mean death for a patient in need.
Three entrepreneurs—William Hetzler, Keller Rinaudo, and Keenan Wyrobeck—founded Zipline in 2014 with the goal of solving such problems through on-demand deliveries by drone. Rwanda was the ideal test bed, with its challenging terrain, relatively small size (about the same area as the U.S. state of Maryland), extensive wireless connectivity, and receptive government.
Outside observers are cautiously optimistic about the company’s efforts so far. “I like Zipline’s approach in Rwanda—they’re operating commercially, which is more than most drone delivery companies [are doing],” says Adam Klaptocz, cofounder and CEO of Rigitech, a Swiss startup that’s using small cargo drones to connect rural communities in the developing world. “They’re not trying to be the solution for all drone deliveries,” says Klaptocz. “But they’re doing this, and it seems like they’re doing it better than the existing way.”
Technicians stow the blood in the drone’s cargo bay.
Zipline has two fulfillment centers in Rwanda, which it refers to as “nests.” The Muhanga nest, which we visited, is about 50 km from the capital of Kigali, and a 2-hour drive, thanks to lumbering trucks that clog the main roads. Its small cluster of buildings abuts a maize field, and the locals who work the field grudgingly move out of the way whenever a drone passes low overhead.
Several times a week, blood and blood products arrive here by truck. When one shipment arrives during our visit, Israel Bimpe, Zipline’s head of national implementation, turns to us with a smile, saying: “The blood is here!” Workers spring into action, transferring the packs of whole blood, plasma, and platelets into refrigerators. When an order comes in from a hospital via phone, website, WhatsApp, or SMS, a worker wraps the needed packs in padding and stuffs the bundle into a bright red box, which has a wax-paper parachute attached.
A technician places the box and parachute in the belly of a drone behind a spring-loaded hatch, then snaps a modular battery pack into the drone’s nose. Two people carry the drone to a 13-meter-long electric catapult powered by a bank of supercapacitors, then run through a preflight checklist with the aid of a smartphone app. Zipline confirms the drone’s flight plan with the Rwanda Civil Aviation Authority and requests flight clearance, while the company’s technicians do their best to convince enthusiastic local kids to move a safe distance away from the launch. Finally, with a satisfying zzzing, the catapult flings the drone skyward, accelerating it to 100 kilometers per hour in half a second. It swiftly rises over the Rwandan countryside to a cruising altitude of 120 meters. It’s a dramatic moment—and at Muhanga it happens 20 to 30 times a day.
As soon as a drone—which the company calls a Zip—leaves the catapult, it’s fully autonomous. While both Zipline and the Rwanda Civil Aviation Authority track the aircraft and can redirect it at any time, in practice the Zips are mostly forgotten about until they return home, mission complete. In the air, each Zip follows a predetermined flight plan, relaying data on its position and status through Rwanda’s wireless network.
Our visit to the Kinazi hospital, one of the closer delivery sites, shows us the other end of a Zip’s journey. About 5 minutes before the drone arrives, hospital staff members get an automatic text alert telling them to send someone outside to await the delivery. At Kinazi, that means waiting at the edge of a small grassy field adjacent to the hospital’s parking lot. During our visit, the staff member arrives only after the drone has dropped its package, which just goes to show that blood delivery by drone isn’t the least bit exciting in Rwanda anymore.
The Zipline drone travels along a predetermined flight path to its destination.
Zips can carry relatively large payloads long distances because they’re fixed-wing aircraft, which are significantly more aerodynamically efficient than rotorcraft (such as today’s common quadcopters). Launching a fixed-wing drone from a catapult is easy, but landing it safely—without landing gear or a lengthy runway—is a challenge. Zipline’s solution is a recovery system that the team affectionately refers to as Tall Bob. Its two 10-meter-high towers each have a vertically mounted rotating arm, and a cable is strung between the arms. As a returning Zip flies between these two towers, the arms rotate upward, in a fraction of a second, to snag the cable on a tiny metal hook below the Zip’s tail. The drone is pulled to a stop within a few meters, then the arms allow the drone to swing down and back between the towers. In principle, it’s similar to the way planes land on aircraft carriers.
To reset the system, workers simply lift the Zip off the wire at ground level, and then rotate the arms back up to prepare for the next capture. The Zipline team has grown accustomed to the remarkable precision of its drone-capturing system, but during our visit we never get tired of seeing the wire pluck Zips out of the sky.
While Zips can’t launch when crosswinds are too intense, they can handle both high winds and rain once they’re airborne, so weather-related delays at the launch site tend to be brief. But the system isn’t flawless: Zips will turn around if strong head winds drain too much of their battery power, and despite dual motors and redundant ailerons for flight control, mechanical failures do sometimes happen. If the Zip can’t make it back to the nest, it can autonomously deploy a parachute to bring itself gently to the ground. Zipline estimates that the emergency parachute deploys in around one in a thousand flights.
With dozens of orders coming in every day, Zipline needs to be sure that it always has drones ready to fly. So its engineers designed the Zips to be as modular as possible, allowing technicians to easily detach different pieces for repairs. While such repairs are common, particularly on the strain-bearing wings, there are always more than enough components to snap together into a fully assembled drone. A bank of chargers ensures that a charged battery pack is always ready to be slotted into a drone being prepped for launch.
The Zipline facility in Muhanga takes, on average, 10 minutes to launch an order. But Zipline’s engineers think that’s 9 minutes too long. Bimpe says that incremental changes to the process will eventually enable them to fulfill an order in less than 60 seconds. “We just need to improve it a bit more,” he says. “It’s tweaking operational procedures and improving software to reduce that time to 1 minute. We receive an order and as soon as we finish packing, we just put it on the Zip and it’s ready to go.”
Expected improvements in the Zips themselves will boost range: Today, the farthest hospital that Zipline delivers to is Butaro District Hospital, about 80 km away (45 minutes as the Zip flies). Because weight determines how long and how far a drone can fly, Zipline’s engineers are always looking for ways to lighten the load. Much of the focus is on the battery, which is the heaviest component of the aircraft. “We fight super, super hard to shave off grams,” says Michael Newhouse, Zipline’s battery lead. The Zipline team uses the smallest-gauge wires they can get away with and special wire strippers to remove excess insulation, thus saving fractions of grams.
Zipline’s drones are modular. When an order comes in, technicians snap together the three main components: the lightweight foam chassis [1], the wings [2], and the battery unit [3], which also contains the flight plan. Scanning QR codes [4] initiates automatic preflight tests of the drone’s systems. To keep the drone flying in the event of a minor mechanical failure, it has two motors [5] and redundant ailerons [6] on the wings that help maintain flight control. The drone’s cargo compartment [7] contains the package of blood until it’s parachuted down to the delivery site.
To obviate the need for a lengthy runway for takeoffs and landings, an electric catapult launches the drone, and a wire strung between towers captures the returning drone by snagging a 3-centimeter metal hook [8] on the drone’s tail.
The current Zipline battery is a combination of precision engineering and handmade charm. To make one battery, a technician puts 144 separate lithium-ion cells—each only slightly larger than an AA battery—into slots in the battery case, epoxies them by hand, and wires them together. “It feels halfway between hobby construction and an assembly line,” says Newhouse. The batteries were first assembled on-site in Rwanda, but are now shipping straight from California.
Zipline’s next-generation battery, currently in development, will be much easier to assemble, with cells that slip into prefabricated plates and get spot-welded into place. Yet the company can’t seem to stop reexamining, reconsidering, and refining its designs. “Watt-hours per kilo,” says Newhouse, referring to the essential metric driving the company’s battery design process. “That’s what’s going to make or break your system.”
Despite the intense focus on keeping the drone’s weight down, today’s Zips can carry a payload of only 1.3 kilograms. “Right now, with this generation, we can deliver two units of blood,” with some capacity to spare, says Eric Watson, a systems engineer at Zipline. The remodeled Zip that the company is currently working on will have a lighter chassis, a more efficient battery, and a payload of 1.75 kg, enabling a single drone to carry up to three units of blood at a time. It will also have a receiver for transponder signals from other aircraft, a backup communication system that uses a satellite link, and onboard sense-and-avoid equipment that will, Watson says, “be able to detect and avoid uncooperative aircraft in our airspace.” This advanced feature will likely become a safety-critical system for delivery drones as the skies get more crowded.
While the technologyinvolved in drone delivery is impressive, the economics are more uncertain. Experts say Zipline’s high-tech solution for blood delivery is a new twist on an old story. “Go to any hospital in Africa and you’ll find a graveyard of machines,” says Jonathan Ledgard, who was the Afrotech director at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, in Switzerland, until 2016. “The whole history of Africa is medical equipment that was too expensive.”
Ledgard notes that Zipline currently receives subsidies from the Rwandan government to make its service affordable for hospitals. He suggests the company may be in trouble if those subsidies end. “The price points they have to charge once the subsidies end are far, far, far too high for developing countries,” Ledgard says.
Covering a Country: Zipline’s drones can fly to hospitals up to 80 kilometers away along predetermined routes, allowing two distribution sites to cover nearly all of Rwanda.Illustration: Zipline
Zipline is reluctant to disclose how much its Rwandan fulfillment centers cost to operate or how much it gets paid by the Rwandan government per delivery. The company has admitted that routine blood deliveries by drone are currently more expensive than routine deliveries by ground vehicle, which move more blood per load. But Zipline argues that the economics change in emergencies.
As Zipline seeks to expand its delivery services to more African countries, cost and sustainability are becoming central topics of discussion. Its first expansion effort, in Tanzania in 2018, fell through during contract negotiations with the government. But at the end of 2018, the government of Ghana approved a four-year contract [PDF] to deliver blood and other medical supplies by drone, worth an estimated US $12.5 million for Zipline.
The plan for Ghana calls for four fulfillment centers that will make between 100 and 150 deliveries per day. The Ghanaian government estimates a per-delivery cost of $17. Both the minority party in the country’s parliament and the Ghana Health Service criticized the contract as being too expensive, arguing that funds could be better spent elsewhere. Nevertheless, the contract was approved, and Zipline has already begun making deliveries from its first distribution center in the country.
Over the long term, Zipline argues that minimizing waste in the medical system will help the drones pay for themselves. In Rwanda, the cost to collect, test, and store a unit of blood is about $80. Before Zipline came along, about 7 percent of blood packs expired without being used, costing the Rwandan government more than $1 million annually. In 2018, the hospitals that Zipline serves wasted no blood packs at all.
Ledgard says Zipline may find a business model that works—but only for lifesaving medical deliveries. He says the current drones can’t compete with motorbikes, which can carry about 15 kg, for routine deliveries. “Until you get to 6 or more likely 12 kg [for drones], it’s not viable,” Ledgard says. Yet he gives Zipline credit for getting a delivery-drone company off the ground. “They’ve done what people like me have been talking about,” he says. “I take my hat off to them.”
As of press time, Zipline’s drones have flown a total of over 1 million km. As Zipline scales up its operations, it will likely clock its next million kilometers in under six months. In addition to its expansion into Ghana, Zipline is also part of a pilot program run by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, which will test medical deliveries in rural areas of North Carolina later this year.
The Rwandan government recently awarded Zipline a new, three-year contract, which includes provisions for delivering other medical products beside blood, such as medicine and vaccines. That service expansion means that Zips will soon be making drops to many small clinics, not only to hospitals. Zipline is also planning to assemble its drones in Rwanda rather than importing them from the United States. Clearly, Zipline is in Rwanda to stay.
It’s getting dark at Zipline’s Muhanga nest as we pack our bags and get ready for the long, winding drive back to Kigali. Red landing lights turn on along the approach path that the Zips follow—the drones don’t need the lights, but they look cool. In the distance, we can hear the faint buzz of another Zip returning home after making its delivery of blood. Anywhere else on Earth, it would be futuristic. In rural Rwanda, it’s just routine.
This article appears in the May 2019 print issue as “The Blood Is Here.”
Your weekly selection of awesome robot videos
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.
I honestly could not tell you whether this goes against Boston Dynamics' terms of sale or not.
From a robotics perspective, this is a nifty project, and well executed by Allen Pan. From the perspective of someone who loves snakes for what they are (!), I just want to point out that snakes do not need legs, do not want legs, do very well without legs, and are adorable without any modifications.
And this is picture of my best friend Satin, who wants you to know that she's perfect without any legs at all:
Ok but what's the deal with the dude watching the video of a fake robot right at the beginning there?
Looks like the base model is a mere $5500.
You'll want to turn the subtitles on for this one. Thank you, ASIMO.
Is there anything that ANYmal can't traverse? Sure there is! But this is impressive anyway.
Two arms for $1700 seems pretty good, although as with most affordable hardware, getting it to do something useful is probably on you.
This is not a great video, but the technology is important: using drones to identify power line issues that could start wildfires.
Rethink Robotics: still doing stuff.
Many challenges still lie ahead for postquantum cryptography
Charles Q. Choi is a science reporter who contributes regularly to IEEE Spectrum. He has written for Scientific American, The New York Times, Wired, and Science, among others.
Future quantum computers may rapidly break modern cryptography. Now researchers find that a promising algorithm designed to protect computers from these advanced attacks could get broken in just 4 minutes. And the catch is that 4-minute time stamp was not achieved by a cutting-edge machine but by a regular 10-year-old desktop computer. This latest, surprising defeat highlights the many hurdles postquantum cryptography will need to clear before adoption, researchers say.
In theory, quantum computers can quickly solve problems it might take classical computers untold eons to solve. For example, much of modern cryptography relies on the extreme difficulty that classical computers face when it comes to mathematical problems such as factoring huge numbers. However, quantum computers can in principle run algorithms that can rapidly crack such encryption.
To stay ahead of this quantum threat, cryptographers around the world have spent the past two decades designing postquantum cryptography (PQC) algorithms. These are based on new mathematical problems that both quantum and classical computers find difficult to solve.
“What is most surprising is that the attack seemingly came out of nowhere.” —Jonathan Katz, University of Maryland at College Park
For years, researchers at organizations such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have been investigating which PQC algorithms should become the new standards the world should adopt. NIST announced it was seeking candidate PQC algorithms in 2016, and received 82 submissions in 2017. In July, after three rounds of review, NIST announced four algorithms that would become standards, and four more would enter another round of review as possible additional contenders.
Now a new study has revealed a way to completely break one of these contenders under review, known as SIKE, which Microsoft, Amazon, Cloudflare, and others have investigated. “The attack came from out of the blue, and was a silver bullet,” says cryptographer Christopher Peikert at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, who did not take part in this new work.
SIKE (Supersingular Isogeny Key Encapsulation) is a family of PQC algorithms involving elliptic curves. “Elliptic curves have long been studied in mathematics,” says mathematician Dustin Moody at NIST, who did not take part in this new work. “They are described by an equation looking like y2 = x3 + Ax + B, where A and B are numbers. So for example, an elliptic curve could be y2 = x3 + 3x + 2.”
In 1985, “mathematicians figured out a way to make cryptosystems involving elliptic curves, and these systems have been widely deployed,” Moody says. “However, these elliptic curve cryptosystems turn out to be vulnerable to attacks from a quantum computer.”
Around 2010, researchers found a new way to use elliptic curves in cryptography. “It was believed that this new idea wasn’t susceptible to attacks from quantum computers,” Moody says.
This new approach is based on how two points can be added on an elliptic curve to get another point on the elliptic curve, Moody says. An “isogeny” is a map from one elliptic curve to another elliptic curve that preserves this addition law.
“If you make this map complex enough, the conjectured hard problem, which allows encryption of data, is that given two elliptic curves, it’s hard to find an isogeny between them,” says study coauthor Thomas Decru, a mathematical cryptographer at KU Leuven in Belgium.
SIKE is a form of isogeny-based cryptography based on the Supersingular Isogeny Diffie-Hellman (SIDH) key exchange protocol. “SIDH/SIKE was one of the first practical isogeny-based cryptographic protocols,” Decru says.
However, one of SIKE’s vulnerabilities was that in order for it to work, it needed to provide extra information to the public known as auxiliary torsion points. “Attackers have tried to exploit this extra information for a while, but had not been successful in using it to break SIKE,” Moody says. “However, this new paper found a way to do it, using some pretty advanced mathematics.”
To explain this new attack, Decru says that although elliptic curves are one-dimensional objects, in mathematics elliptic curves can be visualized as objects of two dimensions or any other number of dimensions. One can also create isogenies between these generalized objects.
“People were naturally concerned that there might still be major attacks to be discovered, and they were right.” —Steven Galbraith, University of Auckland
By applying a 25-year-old theorem, the new attack uses the extra information that SIKE makes public to construct an isogeny in two dimensions. This isogeny can then reconstruct the secret key that SIKE uses to encrypt a message. Decru and study senior author Wouter Castryck detailed their findings on 5 August in the Cryptology ePrint Archive.
“To me what is most surprising is that the attack seemingly came out of nowhere,” says cryptographer Jonathan Katz at the University of Maryland at College Park, who did not take part in this new work. “There were very few prior results showing any weaknesses in SIKE, and then suddenly this result appeared with a completely devastating attack—namely, it finds the entire secret key, and does so relatively quickly without any quantum computation.”
Using an algorithm based on this new attack, the researchers found that a 10-year-old Intel desktop took 4 minutes to find a secret key secured by SIKE.
“Usually, when a proposed cryptosystem gets seriously attacked, this happens relatively soon after the system is proposed, or begins to attract attention, or in a progression of research results over time, or yields not a total break but significant weakening of the system. In this instance we saw none of that,” Peikert says. “Attacks on SIDH/SIKE went from essentially no progress for 11 to 12 years, since SIDH was first proposed, to a total break.”
Although researchers had tested SIKE for more than a decade, “one of the reasons why SIKE was not selected for standardization is that there was concern that it is too new and has not been studied enough,” says mathematician Steven Galbraith at the University of Auckland, in New Zealand, who did not take part in this new work. “People were naturally concerned that there might still be major attacks to be discovered, and they were right.”
One reason SIKE’s vulnerability was not detected until now was because the new attack “applies very advanced mathematics—I can’t think of another situation where an attack has used such deep mathematics compared with the system being broken,” says Galbraith. Katz agrees, saying, “I suspect that fewer than 50 people in the world understand both the underlying mathematics and the necessary cryptography.”
Moreover, isogenies “are notoriously ‘difficult,’ both from an implementation and a theoretical perspective,” says cryptographer David Joseph at the PQC startup Sandbox AQ in Palo Alto, Calif., who did not take part in this new work. “This makes it more likely that fundamental flaws can persist undetected so late in the competition.”
“We proposed a system, which everyone agrees seemed like a good idea at the time, and after subsequent analysis someone is able to find a break. It is unusual that it took 10 years, but otherwise nothing to see here.” —David Jao, University of Waterloo
Furthermore, “it should be noted that with many more algorithms in earlier rounds, the cryptanalysis was spread much more thinly, whereas for the past couple of years researchers have been able to concentrate on a smaller batch of algorithms,” Joseph says.
SIKE co-inventor David Jao, a professor at the University of Waterloo, in Canada, says, “I think the new result is magnificent work and I give the authors my highest praise.” At first, “I felt sad that SIKE had been invalidated, because it is such a mathematically elegant scheme, but the new findings simply reflect how science works,” he says. “We proposed a system, which everyone agrees seemed like a good idea at the time, and after subsequent analysis someone is able to find a break. It is unusual that it took 10 years, but otherwise nothing to see here except the ordinary course of progress.“
In addition, “it’s far better for SIKE to be broken now than in some hypothetical alternative world where SIKE becomes widely deployed and everyone comes to rely on it before it gets broken,” Jao says.
SIKE is the second NIST PQC candidate to get broken this year. In February, cryptographer Ward Beullens at IBM Research, in Zurich, revealed he could break third-round candidate Rainbow in a weekend on a laptop. “So this shows that all the PQC schemes still require further study,” Katz says.
Still, these new findings break SIKE but not other isogeny-based cryptography systems, such as CSIDH or SQIsign, Moody notes. “People from the outside may think isogeny-based cryptography is dead now, but this is far from true,” Decru says. “There’s still much to research, if you ask me.”
In addition, this new work also may not reflect one way or the other on NIST’s PQC research. SIKE was the only isogeny-based cryptosystem of the 82 submissions that NIST received. Similarly, Rainbow was the only multivariate algorithm among those submissions, Decru says.
“We have no absolute guarantee of security for any cryptosystem. The best we can say is that after a lot of study by a lot of smart people, nobody has found any cracks.” —Dustin Moody, NIST
The other designs that NIST is adopting as standards or have made it to NIST’s fourth round “are based on mathematical ideas that have a longer track record of study and analysis by cryptographers,” Galbraith says. “This does not guarantee they are secure, but it just means they have withstood attacks for a longer time.”
Moody agrees, noting “it is always the case that some amazing breakthrough result could be discovered which breaks a cryptosystem. We have no absolute guarantee of security for any cryptosystem. The best we can say is that after a lot of study by a lot of smart people, nobody has found any cracks in the cryptosystem.”
Still, “our process was designed to allow for attacks and breaks,” Moody says. “We’ve seen them in each of the evaluation rounds. It’s the only way to gain confidence in the security.” Galbraith agrees, noting that such research “is the process working.”
Nevertheless, “I feel like the combination of Rainbow and SIKE falling will make more people seriously think about requiring a back-up plan for any winner that emerges from the NIST postquantum standardization process,” Decru says. “Relying on just one mathematical concept or scheme may be too risky. This is something NIST themselves thinks as well—their main scheme will most likely be lattice-based, but they want a nonlattice backup.”
Decru notes that other researchers are already developing new versions of SIDH/SIKE they suggest may thwart this new attack. “I expect more such results to follow, where people try to patch SIDH/SIKE, as well as improvements on our attack,” Decru says.
All in all, the fact that the starting point of this new attack was a theorem “totally unrelated to cryptography” shows “the importance of fundamental research in pure mathematics in order to understand cryptosystems,” Galbraith says.
Decru agrees, noting that “in mathematics, not everything is applicable right away. Hell, there are things that will almost surely never be applicable to any real-life situation. But that doesn’t mean we should not allow research to steer in these more obscure topics from time to time.”
Enhance your development efficiency with myBuddy, the most cost-effective dual-arm collaborative robot
In July 2022, Elephant Robotics released myBuddy—a dual-arm, 13-axis humanoid collaborative robot powered by Raspberry Pi with multiple functions—at an incredible price. It works with multiple accessories such as suction pumps, grippers, and more. Additionally, users can boost their secondary development with the artificial intelligence and myAGV kits and detailed tutorials published by Elephant Robotics. myBuddy helps users achieve more applications and developments as a collaborative robotic arm.
Elephant Robotics has been committed to R&D, manufacturing, and producing collaborative robots, such as myCobot, mechArm, myPalletizer, and myAGV. To meet the expectations of users from more than 50 countries worldwide and allow everyone to enjoy the world of robotics, Elephant Robotics is achieving more breakthroughs in product R&D ability and manufacturing capacity.
In 2020, the team of Elephant Robotics found that the need for robotics applications was increasing, so they decided to produce a robot with multiple functions that could meet more requirements. In the development and production process, the team met many difficulties. At least three auxiliary control chips were needed to develop more functions, increasing the production difficulty by more than 300 percent compared to myCobot, a 6-axis collaborative robot (cobot). The biggest problem was how to make a robot with multiple functions at an affordable and reasonable price.
After more than two years of continuous efforts, Elephant Robotics has upgraded the myCobot series and transferred it to the new myBuddy cobot based on its highly integrated product design and self-developed robot control platform. The product design of myBuddy is based on the myCobot series combined rounded corners, and the overall industrial design style is simple and beautiful. A robot at an affordable price makes the development of dual-arm cobot applications no longer a problem.
Get to know what applications myBuddy can achieve through the features and functional analysis.
The working radius of a single arm of myBuddy is 280 millimeters, and the maximum payload is 250 grams. It is light and flexible, with 13 degrees of freedom. The built-in axis in the torso of myBuddy improves the working range by more than 400 percent compared to myCobot's single robotic arm, so it can perform more complicated tasks such as flag waving, kinematics practice, and AI recognition.
There are more than 100 API interfaces that can be used, and the bottom control interfaces of myBuddy are open. The potential value, angles, coordinates, running speeds, and other interfaces can be controlled freely, so users can master the application research of dual-arm robots, motion path planning, development of action, and visual recognition. On the hardware interface, myBuddy provides a variety of input and output interfaces, including HDMI, USB, Grove, 3.3V IO, LEGO, RJ45 interface, and more.
In the software, myBuddy supports multiple programming environments. myBlockly, a visual tool with multiple built-in robot application cases for graphical programming, simple and easy for users to use and develop their projects. Users can also control myBuddy in Python and set the joint angle and robot coordinates, and get the speed position in real-time (response time up to 20 milliseconds). Moreover, myBuddy supports the simulation development environment ROS. With the built-in ROS environment, users can realize robot motion path planning algorithm research, dual-arm interference avoidance algorithm research, robot vision learning, and other artificial intelligence application development.
myBuddy has a 7-inch interactive display screen, two 2-million-pixel HD cameras, and more than 20 built-in dynamic facial expressions. Users can conduct scientific research in human-robot interaction, robot vision, robotics learning, artificial intelligence, action planning, mechatronics, manufacturing, and automation with myBuddy. The built-in cameras support area location positioning, object, and QR code recognition. myBuddy can achieve face and body recognition, motion simulation, and trajectory tracking with the cameras.
With fast, high-tech development, VR technology is beginning to become an area of independent research and development, so Elephant Robotics decided to build a VR wireless control function into myBuddy. In this function, users can not only experience human-robot interaction and carry out some dangerous scientific experiments, they can also explore more principles and basic applications of wireless control in cobots, such as underwater exploration, remotely-piloted vehicles, and space exploration. In the future, myBuddy can be used as a surgeon in the support of a virtual surgical system.
Elephant Robotics has developed more than 20 robotic arm accessories, including an end-effector, base, camera, mobile phone gripper, and more. myBuddy has more flexibility, maneuverability, and load capacity than myCobot's single robotic arm. The ability to grasp and move objects has been effectively improved in both rigid and flexible objects and effectively avoids any collisions between the two arms when working. With these accessories, myBuddy can perform more applications in science and education. For example, after installing a gripper and a suction pump, myBuddy can grab test tubes and pour liquids.
A dual-arm robot at an affordable price is a preferred choice for many individual developers, especially teachers and students in robotics and engineering. myBuddy, with its multiple functions supported, will help people explore and develop more possibilities in the world of robotics.
myBuddy 280-Pi | The most compact collaborative Dual-arm robot in the world
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