The vast majority of drones are rotary-wing systems (like quadrotors), and for good reason: They’re cheap, they’re easy, they scale up and down well, and we’re getting quite good at controlling them, even in very challenging environments. For most of the applications, though, drones lose out to birds and their flapping wings in almost every way—flapping wings are very efficient, enable astonishing agility, and are much safer, able to make compliant contact with surfaces rather than shredding them like a rotor system does. But flapping wing have their challenges too: Making…

Since January, construction has been underway on a huge Gundam robot—a popular fictional robot that will appears in some 50 TV series and movies since 1979, not to mention a slew of video games and manga. Coming in at about 60 feet tall, the Gundam will be impossible to miss from the Port of Yokohama, just south of Tokyo, where it will call home for a full year. Although the COVID-19 pandemic has halted progress on various construction projects, worldwide, the Gundam perseveres. You can check out the progress for yourself in this…

Robots and self-driving cars have been the secret heroes of the coronavirus outbreak, and now they can could soon be cooking our food, too. In mid-July, White Castle—the oldest hamburger restaurant in the U.S.—announced that it’s partnering with Miso Robotics, a Pasadena, California-based industrial automation company, to create a robot that will serve up hamburgers. Named Flippy, this robot will begin preparing patties and dunking fries into hot vats of oil sometime this fall. Despite this being Flippy’s first official fast food rodeo, the autonomous robot already has a built-in fanbase. The…

Snapchat is all set to take on TikTok with the announcement of a new feature in that will allow Snapchat users set their Snaps to music – just like TikTok does. Currently being tested, this feature will allow Snapchat to effectively capture a chunk of the TikTok users who have been looking for alternatives ever since the Trump administration in the US have been hot-footing a ban on TikTok and other Chinese technology companies. TikTok is currently banned in India and in some other countries as well, so if Snapchat manages to…

SaaS unicorn Freshworks has asked about the  US court to dismiss a plea filed against it by rival Zoho Corporation, a Chennai-based SaaS company. In March, Zoho filed a case against Freshworks at the California Northern District Court under the Defense of Trade Secrets Act, accusing it of accessing and using confidential customer data. Now, Freshworks has said that Zoho’s plea lacked “specificity and particularity” in its allegations. According to the case filed by Zoho Corp earlier this year, files of which were accessed, the company accused Freshworks of building its…

The Covid-19 pandemic has the plot of a dystopian film scripted that none of us want to even watch, least of all, be featured in. But the humans were not asked of their opinion. The extremely contagious disease spread as fast as the horror stories about it. Soon, most of the countries were grappling with growing number of Covid positive cases and needed intervention at the earliest. There were not enough humans on the planet to win a fight of this magnitude. To stop the spread, even the most skeptical…

Samsung Electronics Co Ltd is forging a comeback in India’s smartphone market with a new range of budget devices and a ramped-up to the  online presence, aiming to recoup ground ceded to Chinese rivals such as Xiaomi Corp. Samsung, the only major non-Chinese player in the country, has already begun to gain ground, and a surge in anti-China sentiment in India following a border clash in June is expected to provide a fresh boost. Samsung jumped to the No. 2 spot with 26% market share in the second quarter behind the  Xiaomi’s…

The Covid-19 pandemic is fueling an e-commerce boom as per the shuttered businesses move online — but Google isn’t benefiting in the way its big tech rivals are. Google advertising sales fell 8% in the second quarter, causing overall revenue at parent Alphabet to shrink for the first time. The company’s main digital ad rival Facebook Inc. saw sales jump 11%, while Amazon revenue soared 40%. Those gaps is highlighted how Google has struggled to parlay its online search dominance into a meaningful e-commerce business. Google’s shares fell upto 3%…