I’m sure none of us would say no to a cute animal video right now, so here’s Kody in the nick of time.

Unfortunately, the drone in the video is the real point of focus for Exyn Technologies, which released the video last week showing what they claim to be the first-ever drone flight controlled by a dog.

Kody the dog does, however, take the edge off. He’s a good boy.

His role in the whole process is simple – he has to tap a touch screen which he does like a pro, before settling back down on his bed to chill.

The ExynAero drone then flies off to do its thing unmanned – or ‘undogged’ as the case may be.

Take it in:

While the video is adorable, says Forbes, it also alerts us to the rapid evolution of drone technology.

The message is simple: AI has become so efficient, that a complicated piece of technology can be controlled by a dog.

Most drones, like the big MQ-9 Reapers and MQ-4 Global Hawks used by the US military, have to be operated by a person on the ground.

Other more sophisticated models can be programmed to fly a specific route and take off and land automatically using GPS coordinates.

The ExynAero is another animal entirely.

It is designed to operate in challenging environments like inside mines, with no GPS to guide it, and no communication with a human being who would normally be behind the controls.

Instead, the drone uses a smart control system, known as ExynAI , which the company describes as the first-ever ‘industrial-grade autonomy’ through a “series of behavioural building blocks” that can be “shuffled around and daisy-chained together”.

“Commanding the platform is done using a graphical touch interface that allows the user to specify high-level behaviours, e.g. ‘explore over there,’ which are then decomposed into tasks,” Dr. Jason Derenick, Chief Technology Officer at Exyn, told me.

A standard ‘scoutonomy’ task would involve taking off, flying to the space to be explored, exploring it, and coming back. More complex manoeuvres are possible, for example, the drone can respond to what it finds.

Exyn is a spin-off from the University of Pennsylvania’s world-renowned GRASP Laboratory, which has produced some of the most impressive, and somewhat unsettling, videos of drone development, like this one from 2012:

Most recently, the Guinness Book of Records announced that a Chinese display has broken the record for the largest number of drones in the air at the same time with 3 051 drones flying above Zhuhai:

Watching something like that it’s hard to imagine drones being used for anything nefarious.

Go back and watch Kody do his thing again.

You’ve earned it.

[source:forbes]