Maldrone the First Backdoor for drones

Maldrone the First Backdoor for drones

Maldrone: Backdoor for Drones.
Features: 
Maldrone will get silently installed on a drone.
Interact with with the device drivers and sensors silently.
Lets the bot master controller the drone remotely .
Escape from the Drone owner to Bot master.
Remote surveillance.
Spread to other drones *. 

Demo:
In this we would show infecting a drone with Maldrone and expecting a reverse tcp connection from drone. Once connection is established we can interact with the software as well as drivers/sensors of drone directly. There is an existing AR drone pioloting program. Our backdoors kills the autopilot and takes control. The Backdoor is persistent across resets . 

For this research we are using Parrot Ar Drone 2.0 and DJI Phantom .Maldrone is developed for AR drone arm linux .

In this demo we will install the drone with Maldrone. Once its installed. The Maldrone will connect back to botmaster and wait for commands. Maldrone can proxy the device driver and sensor communications. Maldrone could interact with the drone communication and proxy data from the drone sensors .

Maldrone would be a good buddy for http://samy.pl/skyjack/ .
Samy's skyjack is an exploit for parrot ardrone . Maldrone is a payload and not and exploit. So once you hack a drone using skyjack or any drone specific vulnerability. You then install Maldrone as a backdoor. 


The idea: AR drone Introduction
Ar drone quad-copter contains a 9 degrees-of-freedom (DOF) .
"Degrees Of Freedom" or "DOF" is a number of axis and sensors combined for balancing a plane, a helicopter or a robot.
ref: http://playground.arduino.cc/Main/Wh...9DOF10DOF11DOF

in-ertial measurements unit (IMU)
a) 6 DOF gyroscope and 
b) 3 DOF magnetometer.
c) ul-trasound sensor[ used for low altitude measure-ments
d) a pressure sensor [Altitude measurement at all altitudes. 
c) a GPS sensor.

The access to these sensor data are made available via serial ports. 
The Ar drone has a binary named program.elf which controls the entire drone using these nav-board data. This little program is smart enough to perform auto landing , flight stability and various other AR drone tricks.
Check out this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcxBf-kegKo

Is Maldrone the first malware for drones?
Ar Drone also exposes a high level api , and this is open sourced. This would let you control the drone via AT commands. And could program the drone to do pretty much anything. Lot of previous researches and attempts to backdoor drones used this API . This would make the backdoor concept very generic to AR drone. 

Snakes and snake-like robots show how sidewinders conquer sandy slopes

Snakes and snake-like robots show how sidewinders conquer sandy slopes

In a study published in the October 10 issue of the journal Science, researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University, Oregon State University, and Zoo Atlanta report that sidewinders improve their ability to traverse sandy slopes by simply increasing the amount of their body area in contact with the granular surfaces they're climbing.

As part of the study, the principles used by the sidewinders to gracefully climb sand dunes were tested using a modular snake robot developed at Carnegie Mellon. Before the study, the snake robot could use one component of sidewinding motion to move across level ground, but was unable to climb the inclined sand trackway the real snakes could readily ascend. In a real-world application -- an archaeological mission in Red Sea caves -- sandy inclines were especially challenging to the robot.

However, when the robot was programmed with the unique wave motion discovered in the sidewinders, it was able to climb slopes that had previously been unattainable. The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Army Research Office, and the Army Research Laboratory.

"Our initial idea was to use the robot as a physical model to learn what the snakes experienced," said Daniel Goldman, an associate professor in Georgia Tech's School of Physics. "By studying the animal and the physical model simultaneously, we learned important general principles that allowed us to not only understand the animal, but also to improve the robot."

The detailed study showed that both horizontal and vertical motion had to be understood and then replicated on the snake-like robot for it to be useful on sloping sand.

"Think of the motion as an elliptical cylinder enveloped by a revolving tread, similar to that of a tank," said Howie Choset, a Carnegie Mellon professor of robotics. "As the tread circulates around the cylinder, it is constantly placing itself down in front of the direction of motion and picking itself up in the back. The snake lifts some body segments while others remain on the ground, and as the slope increases, the cross section of the cylinder flattens."

At Zoo Atlanta, the researchers observed several sidewinders as they moved in a large enclosure containing sand from the Arizona desert where the snakes live. The enclosure could be raised to create different angles in the sand, and air could be blown into the chamber from below, smoothing the sand after each snake was studied. Motion of the snakes was recorded using high-speed video cameras which helped the researchers understand how the animals were moving their bodies.

"We realized that the sidewinder snakes use a template for climbing on sand, two orthogonal waves that they can control independently," said Hamid Marvi, a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon who conducted the experiments while he was a graduate student in the laboratory of David Hu, an associate professor in Georgia Tech's School of Mechanical Engineering. "We used the snake robot to systematically study the failure modes in sidewinding. We learned there are three different failure regimes, which we can avoid by carefully adjusting the aspect ratio of the two waves, thus controlling the area of the body in contact with the sand."

Limbless animals like snakes can readily move through a broad range of surfaces, making them attractive to robot designers.

"The snake is one of the most versatile of all land animals, and we want to capture what they can do," said Ross Hatton, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Oregon State University who has studied the mathematical complexities of snake motion, and how they might be applied to robots. "The desert sidewinder is really extraordinary, with perhaps the fastest and most efficient natural motion we've ever observed for a snake."

Many people dislike snakes, but in this study, the venomous animals were easy study subjects who provided knowledge that may one day benefit humans, noted Joe Mendelson, director of research at Zoo Atlanta.

"If a robot gets stuck in the sand, that's a problem, especially if that sand happens to be on another planet," he said. "Sidewinders never get stuck in the sand, so they are helping us create robots that can avoid getting stuck in the sand. These venomous snakes are offering something to humanity."

The modular snake robot used in this study was specifically designed to pass horizontal and vertical waves through its body to move in three-dimensional spaces. The robot is two inches in diameter and 37 inches long; its body consists of 16 joints, each joint arranged perpendicular to the previous one. That allows it to assume a number of configurations and to move using a variety of gaits -- some similar to those of a biological snake.

"This type of robot often is described as biologically inspired, but too often the inspiration doesn't extend beyond a casual observation of the biological system," Choset said. "In this study, we got biology and robotics, mediated by physics, to work together in a way not previously seen."

Choset's robots appear well suited for urban search-and-rescue operations in which robots need to make their way through the rubble of collapsed structures, as well as archaeological explorations. Able to readily move through pipes, the robots also have been tested to evaluate their potential for inspecting nuclear power plants from the inside out.

For Goldman's team, the work builds on earlier research studying how turtle hatchlings, crabs, sandfish lizards, and other animals move about on complex surfaces such as sand, leaves, and loose material. The team tests what it learns from the animals on robots, often gaining additional insights into how the animals move.

"We are interested in how animals move on different types of granular and complex surfaces," Goldman said. "The idea of moving on flowing materials like sand can be useful in a broad sense. This is one of the nicest examples of collaboration between biology and robotics."

In addition to those already mentioned, co-authors included Chaohui Gong and Matthew Travers from Carnegie Mellon University; and Nick Gravish and Henry Astley from Georgia Tech.

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation under awards CMMI-1000389, PHY-0848894, PHY-1205878, and PHY-1150760; by the Army Research Office under grants W911NF-11-1-0514 and W911NF1310092; and by the Army Research Lab MAST CTA under grant W911NF-08-2-0004; and by the Elizabeth Smithgall Watts endowment at Georgia Tech.

Game technology can make emergency robots easier to control

Game technology can make emergency robots easier to control

An international research team is adapting a technique known to gamers as "free look control," to emergency response robots, which will enable the robots to mimic way the human body turns in relation to the movement of the head and direction of sight.

Petter Ögren, Associate Professor at the Center for Autonomous Systems (CAS) at Stockholm's KTH Royal Institute of Technology, says the technique would allow a more natural interaction with the robot than currently in use when the so-called unmanned ground vehicles (UGV) are sent into burning or collapsed buildings and other places too dangerous for human responders.

"The idea is to reduce the mental strain on the operator, so they can focus on the environment they are dealing with," he says.

With free look control, an operator interacts with a remote controlled robot in much the same way they would with an avatar in role-playing or first-person shooter games such as Call of Duty.

But emergency response is no game. Time is precious and it's critical for those controlling the robots to quickly attain what responders call "situational awareness" -- the understanding of the environment and what is happening in it. Situational awareness enables an operator to maintain a mental picture of their environment. In a burning house, the operator keeps track of in which room the robot has been, and when it's time to go upstairs to search the next floor.

While the current standard, "tank control" is more straightforward to implement, it takes more concentration to use. The camera movements and the robot's body movements are each directed by different levers that are linked to different pieces of hardware, says Ögren. In other words, they are controlled independently of each other.

But with free look control, the commanded direction of motion of the robot is always interpreted relative to the view of the camera. So if the robot is looking to the right, the forward control lever will move the robot toward the direction in which it is looking. The operator will not have to take the orientation of the robot into account, which is the case when using tank control.

The robot is also able to easily move perpendicular to its direction of view, a technique gamer's call "strafing," which is a quite natural thing to do when conducting tasks such as searching an environment for victims.

Ögren says that in tests that the team conducted with a fire brigade in Pisa, Italy, 12 out of 16 users preferred free look control. One of the tests included searching an indoor industrial environment for two minutes, trying to find as many markers as possible.

"Using tank control, the average was 4.5 markers per user. Using free look control, they found an average of 6," he says.

The research was conducted within the framework of the EU project, Long-Term Human-Robot Teaming for Robot-Assisted Disaster Response (TRADR), which is included in the Seventh Framework Programme, FP7. In addition to CAS at KTH, researchers from Germany, Switzerland, Netherlands and Italy are involved in the project.

The world’s most advanced bionic hand

The world’s most advanced bionic hand

Researchers have created a new neural interface to provide sensory information from an artificial hand to the brain. This interface is able to link the patient's nervous system with the artificial sensors, embedded in the prosthesis, enabling the user to control complex hand and finger movements.

Mr Sørensen, whose hand was amputated ten years ago, has been participating in the project's experiments, 'They gave me a baseball to hold and for the first time in a decade I could feel I was holding something round in my prosthetic hand.'

To make it possible for Mr Sørensen to feel the shape of the object he was holding, the researchers first had to develop a selective, implantable neuro-interface. 'Selective means, for example, that when I'm talking to you in a crowd, I'm not talking to a guy sitting close to you. In other words, the electrodes have an interface with some areas of the nerves and not with others close by,' explains project coordinator Dr Silvestro Micera . Micera and his team enhanced the artificial hand with sensors that detect information about touch, which is sent in real time to the patient, allowing for the natural control of the hand.

With the prototype passing its initial tests with flying colours, the next stage is to identify two or three people to test the prosthesis over some years, with all the elements being portable, wearable or implanted. If that works, in five or six years from now the final stage would be a large-scale clinical trial to establish if the prosthesis can be used widely. Dr Micera firmly believes the prosthesis will be available in ten years time.

Necessity of long-term funding

NEBIAS is a continuation of intensive multi-disciplinary research in this field which started many years ago with the CYBERHAND (Future and Emerging Technologies) (FET) FP5 Project (2002-2005). While CYBERHAND was able to demonstrate a mechanical hand, the task of direct interfacing to the nervous system to enable natural control proved to be beyond the project's reach. Efforts to connect robotic artefacts to the nervous system were pursued notably under FP6 and FP7, with successful testing of a prototype electrode without sensory feedback and investigation on how electrodes could be implanted into a patient's nerve. The sensory feedback challenge was overcome only recently, and NEBIAS, also an FET funded project, is now fully exploiting the prosthesis and further developing the technology to bionic arms.

Building on the results of successive projects allows to overcome the various challenges and to refine the technology, resulting in ground breaking innovation that may well enhance the lives of amputees across Europe and beyond.

Innovation through collaboration

This multi-disciplinary research brought together researchers from materials, computer and neuro-sciences, biomedical microtechnology and electronic engineering. Over these different EU funded projects, scientists from 29 different institutions, involving 7 EU countries (and even a participation from USA) worked together with just one goal -- to make a prosthetic hand that can enable natural sensation and motion.

'This is one of the things I love about the EU,' says Dr Micera. 'These transnational projects are amazing. You can draw on a pool of over 500 million inhabitants to find the best researchers in different fields.'

NEBIAS, also, was launched at the start of November 2013 and will run for four years. It receives EUR 3.4 million from the European Commission's 7th Framework Programme .

An 'eel-lectrifying' future for autonomous underwater robots

An 'eel-lectrifying' future for autonomous underwater robots

Scientists have developed and built a prototype for an eel-like robotic fish to be operable remotely, small, sophisticated and intelligent enough to operate autonomously underwater. A new form of central pattern generator model is presented, by which the swimming pattern of a real Anguilliform fish is successfully applied to the robotic prototype. Mathematical model, control law design, different locomotion patterns, and locomotion planning are presented for an Anguilliform robotic fish.

"Our assessment is that in the inner archipelago there was a plausible foreign underwater operation," Rear Adm. Anders Grenstad commented, "But we believe that what has violated Swedish waters has left."

"Whatever was there could not have been a conventional submarine," Grenstad said, but a "craft of a lesser type." He added that it was "not possible to state how big it was or to what country it belonged." "The operation is substantially complete. The vessels and amphibious units have gone to port and resumed normal preparedness," he said. But, was there, or wasn't there underwater activity in the area? Should the Swedish Navy be searching for something smaller than a dinosaur-like submarine?

Work by the Russian and the Allied militaries to develop underwater devices for information gathering are currently underway. Their aim is to reach areas which are difficult or even impossible for divers to reach; to inspect and clear mines on the sea floor, or even combat enemy scuba divers. The existing effort undertaken trains guard-dolphins; however, animal-rights-activists have opined that using dolphins for military reasons is inhumane, and may harm the world's ecology as rivals might seek to eliminate the threat by killing off the species. Hence, alternative strategies have been put in place to develop unmanned underwater systems as the replacement for military-trained dolphins.

To be able to be operable remotely, small, sophisticated and intelligent enough to operate autonomously underwater, these devices must be flexible, and able to operate in narrow spaces like a snake. Inspired by Anguilliform fish, due to their superior flexibility compared to the other fish forms, a team in Singapore has developed and built a prototype for an eel-like robotic fish. A snake-like form also gives the Anguilliform Robot amphibious potential, owing to the similarity in undulatory locomotion in water and on solid ground.

Mechanically, this robotic fish consists of N-links and N−1 joints, and is controlled by the torques applied to the joints. It was designed to move forward, and backward, as well as turnaround through different reference inputs driven by a three-dimensional coupled Andronov-Hopf oscillators, an artificial neural network, and an outer amplitude modulator. Prof. Jianxin Xu, co-author and researcher for the project reports:

We performed simulations and experiments on the robotic fish, equipped with a motion library to cope with different scenarios, and the results validate the effectiveness of the proposed controllers was able to swim forward and backward as predicted.

Electric Vehicle Fleet Gives California Green Energy Boost

Electric Vehicle Fleet Gives California Green Energy Boost

The crowded highways of Los Angeles just got a little greener, thanks to a new electric-vehicle program sponsored by the U.S. Air Force.The fleet of 42 electrically powered sedans, trucks and vans was recently unveiled at Los Angeles Air Force Base in California. Based on technology known as V2G, or vehicle-to-grid, the vehicles are plugged in to charge when not in use, but they can also be used as generators — producing electricity that is directed back into the local power grid.Collectively, the fleet is capable of providing more than 700 kilowatts of power to the grid, which is enough electricity to power 140 homes, Air Force officials said in a statement.Electric lexiconThe new vehicles will replace Los Angeles Air Force Base's general-purpose vehicle fleet — presumably, the cars and trucks that military personnel use to drive around the city. Many of the vehicles are plug-in electric vehicles, or PEVs.Unlike hybrid electric vehicles — which rely on gasoline-powered engines to stay charged — plug-in electric vehicles are charged the same way cellphones and other electric devices are charged. You simply plug them into a wall socket to recharge their batteries. There are also plug-in hybrid electric vehicles that still have a gas engine but can also be plugged in to recharge the car's battery packs.Only some of the military's new electric cars and trucks have gas engines. Others run only on battery power and differ from many other electric cars because of their ability to transfer electricity back to the grid, in a process known as bi-directional charging. In other words, when these cars are plugged into an electric socket, drivers can either charge the vehicle's batteries, or remove the energy stored in the car's batteries and pump it back into the grid.Powerful stuffThe idea of integrating electric cars into America's power grid has been around since at least 1997, when Willet Kempton, a professor in the College of Earth, Ocean and Environment at the University of Delaware, published his first paper on vehicle-to-grid technology in the peer-reviewed journal Transportation Research.Kempton's more recent work has focused on how whole fleets of V2G-enabled electric vehicles could be used to support existing power systems, as well as future power systems that rely more on solar andwind energy.Currently in the U.S., the power grid handles fluctuations in demand for electricity by storing power in large generators. These generators kick on during peak hours of energy usage (e.g., when everyone gets home from work) and they turn off again when demand for power goes down (e.g., in the middle of the night), Kempton told colleagues at a recent lecture at the University of Delaware."At times, there really isn't enough electricity on the system, and this is when operators would like to take electricity out of storage devices and put it back on the electric grid," Kempton said. "There is a lot of inherent storage available in electric vehicles, and batteries are the cheapest and most versatile way to store electricity." [The 10 Most Outrageous Military Experiments]Cars are an especially good energy-storage optionbecause, most of the time, they're not in use, Kempton said."If a person buys an electric vehicle, they usually drive it about an hour each day. The vehicle is idle for the remaining 23 hours," Kempton said. "We are going to use this electric storage device for the other 23 hours."Electric cars are also a cleaner storage option than generators, many of which still use coal, oil or natural gas to generate electricity. However, some of today's generators do use hydroelectric dams or nuclear reactors — not fossil fuels.Test pilotThe Air Force's new fleet of V2G, plug-in electric vehiclesis one of the first full-scale tests of this technology in the United States. The project received support from the California Energy Commission, which invested $3 million. Federal, state and private energy organizations also contributed to the project, according to Air Force officials.In the near future, the Air Force hopes to expand its V2G program to other bases around the country, including Joint Base Andrews in Maryland and Joint Base McGuire-Dix in New Jersey."The forward thinking of the Air Force promises to be an important signal to the market to move this technology into the mainstream," Kempton said. "By requesting V2G-capable trucks and cars from several vehicle manufacturers, placed in bases in several states, the Air Force has helped to stimulate demand from both automotive suppliers and the electric industry in these states."

rootlogics comming with great offers

rootlogics comming with great offers

Post by RootLogics.

Comet Landing, DJI Inspire Drone, and Giant Fighting Robots

Comet Landing, DJI Inspire Drone, and Giant Fighting Robots

Drone News: FAA Drone Ruling, Bebop Priced, and K-MAX Demo

Drone News: FAA Drone Ruling, Bebop Priced, and K-MAX Demo

Yesterday, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) overruled a federal judge, deciding that remote-controlled aircraft (whether or not they’re autonomous enough to be called “drones”) fall under the purview of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). News on that, plus an update on Parrot’s Bebop drone and some new firefighting skills from Lockheed Martin and KMAX, after the jump.

Here’s the meat of the NTSB’s ruling, which is in response to a 2011 challenge by Raphael “Trappy” Pirker, a hobbyist who felt that the FAA’s juristiction applied only to manned aircraft:

An aircraft is “any” “device” that is “used for flight.” We acknowledge the definitions are as broad as they are clear, but they are clear nonetheless.

The NTSB goes on to say that “at this stage of the proceeding...we decline to address issues beyond the threshold question that produced the decisional order.” And with that, the NTSB has made the FAA entirely responsible for aircraft, unmanned aircraft, remote controlled aircraft, and any and all combinations or permutations thereof.

While hobbyists would likely have preferred that the FAA (and everyone else) just kept out of their business, someone needs to be regulating the use of unmanned aircraft, because of abstract privacy concerns as well as the much less abstract risk of someone getting run over by one. The FAA is in the process of developing an official set of rules and regulations, but until they’re done, things remain cloudy.