Ben-Gurion University

Lifeguards do play a vital role in the prevention of drownings, but at busy beaches, they can't always keep track of all the swimmers at all times. That's where Sightbit is made to come in, as it uses AI to catch what lifeguards may miss.

In the past couple of years, both bomb-carrying balloons and brush fire-causing flaming kites have been launched from Gaza into neighboring Israel. A new system uses lasers to shoot them down, and it could even be used to neutralize drones.

Robots move along in all kinds of different ways. Some walk on legs, others roll on wheels, and some crawl on tracks. At some point though, they'll encounter an obstacle and the RCTR tackles this by rising up and trundling on over.

Scientists are looking into replacing dead and crumbling coral heads with plastic replicas, and some fish prefer them to the genuine article.

Among other things, trained dogs are capable of sniffing out bombs, locating buried survivors at disaster sites, or assisting the physically challenged. They can't, however, always see or hear their handler's commands. A new vest is designed to help, as it relays gentle vibrational cues.

​We've seen a few impressive drones now that can adapt themselves to different modes of transport. Equally so is a new quadcopter developed at Israel's Ben-Gurion University, which flies like a regular quadcopter but turns its propellor arms into wheels to keep moving once it hits the ground. ​

​Agile robots could certainly come in handy for tasks such as locating victims at disaster sites, which is why we've seen ones that hop, sidewind and "swim" across uneven terrain. One of the latest, developed at Israel's Ben-Gurion University, crawls and sprawls.

When it comes to upper-limb rehabilitation, it's helpful for patients to replicate tasks in which they pick up and precisely place objects. According to scientists from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, a good way of motivating patients to do that is to have them play tic tac toe against a robot.

As consumer drones have become more commonplace, so too have concerns that owners might use them for snooping. Researchers have now developed a way to uncover such activity, coming up with a way to intercept a drone's radio signals and tell whether it's been filming things that it shouldn't.

​Israel can now be added to the list of countries that manufacture autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). Developed by a team at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, the HydroCamel II can do things that other AUVs can't.

Keeping an "air gap" between a hard drive and other devices forces any would-be thief to physically go to the machine ... or so you might think. Researchers have shown that hackers could use the flashing LED on the outside of a computer to beam data to a waiting drone.

With the humble handwritten signature still the most commonly used form of biometric used to verify someone's identity, researchers have developed software that leverages the motion detection capabilities of a smartwatch to verify a signature as it is written.