Researchers with the U.S. Army developed and demonstrated a method through which unmanned aircraft systems may autonomously land on unmanned ground vehicles. The team from Army Research Laboratory (ARL) aimed to demonstrate this landing approach without reliance on GPS systems, the Army said Tuesday.

“UAVs will need the ability to operate with no Soldier intervention, and a critical function is landing autonomously on static and moving ground vehicles, recharging, then taking off to perform new missions,” said Stephen Nogar, a researcher with ARL.

Nogar said GPS is easily disrupted, and therefore must not be relied on by unmanned aircraft.

The demonstration made use of low-cost sensors and computers, with no communication established between the custom-built rotary UAS and the Clearpath Warthog UGV. The ground vehicle had a fiducial marker that served as an identifier for the UAS to recognize.

Moving forward, the team will boost the landing's reliability and apply artificial intelligence that would allow the UAS to recognize the UGV without completely relying on the marker.

Interested vendors have until June 15th to submit proposals to the Israel-U.S. Binational Industrial Research and Development Foundation on research and development projects for homeland security technologies. 

BIRD is looking for projects that may lead to commercialization and enhance various applications such as unmanned aerial systems and first responder technologies as part of the 2021 Call for Proposals effort, a joint program between the  Israel Ministry of Public Security and the Department of Homeland Security, DHS said Tuesday.

The proposals are also required to include research and cooperative agreements between Israeli and U.S. companies.

"The BIRD [Homeland Security] program raises awareness of capability gaps within the global innovation ecosystem and helps build relationships between industry and homeland security organizations, both in Israel and the U.S.," said William Bryan, acting undersecretary for science and technology at DHS.

BIRD will accept executive summaries for all proposed projects until April 27th.

Jessica Maxwell, a spokeswoman for the Department of Defense (DOD), said the Pentagon is assessing the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) program to ensure that it is meeting goals without impeding industry participation, FedScoop reported Tuesday. Maxwell told the publication in a statement that the DOD routinely executes assessments at the early stages of major programs.

Robert Metzger, head of law firm Rogers Joseph O’Donnell's Washington, D.C. location, told FedScoop that it is “timely to consider” potential modifications to the CMMC initiative. Metzger noted that he expects the DOD review to address issues such as funding, staffing and the issuance of interim rules finalizing the program.

“It would not surprise me at all if the new administration would want to consider very carefully how best to get this objective achieved,” he added.

The Biden administration could look into potential changes to how the DOD coordinates with the CMMC Accreditation Body and the roles that third-party assessors must assume, according to Metzger.

NASA has studied how virtual, augmented and mixed reality technologies can support exploration missions on Mars and the Moon.

The space agency said Tuesday that its Ames Research Center led three projects that tackled mix reality applications in volcanic environment studies, life-searching in space and operational design for scientific missions in austere environments.

Researchers involved presented their findings in a journal titled “Planetary and Space Science.”

"This represents the culmination of years of work from missions all over the Earth, doing the work of figuring out how we can effectively conduct science on other worlds," said Darlene Lim, the principal investigator of the Biologic Analog Science Associated with Lava Terrains (BASALT) project.

BASALT's third and final deployment took place at Hawaii's Kilauea Caldera and Kilauea Iki regions, where Lim's team simulated exploration with conditions similar to those in Mars. The deployment aimed to demonstrate how astronauts would conduct biology, chemistry and geology studies on Mars, with the help of new technologies.

The second project, titled Systematic Underwater Biogeochemical Science and Exploration Analog (SUBSEA), deployed the Nautilus exploration vessel to the Pacific Ocean. The effort demonstrated geochemical modeling and other techniques to maximize an exploration's scientific yield.

The third project, known as Field Investigations to Enable Solar System Science and Exploration or FINESSE, looked into the similarities of Earth's volcanic land formation with the Moon and Mars. FINESSE's team conducted the study in Idaho and Canada.

AT&T announced on Wednesday that the company is adding new features from Cisco to its SD-WAN capabilities. AT&T SD-WAN with Cisco Teleworker solution will provide customers with fast and secure SD-WAN capabilities whose employees work from home.

“AT&T continues to adapt its offerings to align with the customer needs of today, with these enhancements to SD-WAN with Cisco. As a leader in supporting all shapes and sizes of businesses, and the largest SD-WAN provider in North America, we’re giving businesses the tools not just to manage their needs today, but prepare for the future,” commented Will Eborall, AVP of Product Marketing Management for AT&T.

AT&T SD-WAN with Cisco Teleworker solution is designed to allow businesses to quickly stand up and manage remote employees by using the employees’ home internet connection and layers on the full SD-WAN stack with one piece of hardware. It will provide enterprise-grade services without sacrificing performance.

Public sector clients of AT&T SD-WAN with Cisco Federal Information Security Modernization Act (FISMA) will enjoy managed, high-performance policy-based service while meeting the FISMA criteria for managing system security and risks.

Customers will also have a co-managed option. This will provide customers the ability to self-manage and control their business application policies. The co-managed option will still rely on AT&T for managed service support for configuration, fault and performance management.

AT&T and Cisco’s product will emphasize security and prioritize business applications over non-business traffic. It is simple to deploy and will give employees visibility into the edge, with near real-time manageability.

“Today’s distributed workforce needs superior home office connectivity that makes working at home just as fluid as being in the office with consistent connectivity, performance and enterprise-grade security. The AT&T SD-WAN with Cisco Teleworker solution meets these requirements by providing an office-like experience to workers while keeping enterprise assets highly secure,” added JL Valente, Cisco’s VP of Product Management, Enterprise Routing and SD-WAN.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has released a three-part guide designed to help hotels boost the protection of customer data and other contents of their property management systems against cyber threats.

Titled “Securing Property Management Systems,” the guide advises hotel owners on how to cybersecure the systems that hold credit card data and other personal information of guests, NIST said Tuesday.

“Our practice guide documents show we enabled cybersecurity concepts such as zero trust architecture, moving target defense, tokenization of credit card data and role-based authentication in a reference design that addresses cybersecurity and privacy risk,” said Bill Newhouse, a cybersecurity engineer at the agency’s National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE).

The guide’s first part is an executive summary while the second one features guidance on the approach, architecture and security characteristics hotels should be aware of to reduce risks. The third and final part educates information technology practitioners on how to implement the security recommendations.

Cybersecurity technology providers helped NCCoE and the hospitality business community develop a design that could safeguard information within the PMS and connected IT infrastructure of hotels. The “PMS reference design” could also stop users from accessing various systems and services.

Hospitality is the third among industries that experienced cybersecurity breaches in 2019, according to an industry report. Thirteen percent of the total incidents compromised hotel chains.