The Energy Department has chosen five Nanoscale Science Research Centers to submit proposals to study quantum computing and information processing methods through a potential three-year, $30 million initiative.

DOE said Wednesday it will provide up to $10 million in grants per year on a competitive basis to help the NSRCs conduct research and obtain equipment under the Quantum Information Science initiative.

The department expects researchers to delve into quantum physics or subatomic reality to provide a substitute to information processing and other systems.

“QIS represents the future in a wide range of fields from computing to physics to materials science, and it will play a major role in shaping the technologies of tomorrow,” Energy Secretary Rick Perry said.

DOE invited the following research centers to pursue QIS grants:

• The Center for Nanoscale Materials at Argonne National Laboratory
• The Center for Functional Nanomaterials at Brookhaven National Laboratory
• The Molecular Foundry at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
• The Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory
• The Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies of Sandia National Laboratory and Los Alamos Laboratory.

The U.S. Air Force is seeking ideas from industry and academic professionals on how to secure temporary, fixed and mobile assets as part of the military branch’s AFWERX Fusion Challenge.

USAF said Tuesday the challenge represents an open innovation platform for the service branch to collaborate with potential non-military partners in areas such as technology, engineering and defense.

Interested parties can submit input through May 20.

“We’ve created the AFWERX Fusion Challenge to accelerate inventive ideas from garages and labs … in the most collaborative way … and get them to America’s Airmen at the speed of relevance,” said Gen. Stephen Wilson, USAF vice chief of staff.

The branch will choose submitters who can present their ideas to military officials and investors at an event slated to take place in Las Vegas on June 20 and 21.

AFWERX Fusion Xperience aims to bring together Defense Department representatives, small businesses, entrepreneurs and academic experts to help USAF identify technology platforms across different areas of focus.

The U.S. Army will possibly conduct a demonstration in late summer or early fall this year that involves launching an autonomous aircraft from a rotary-wing platform, Defense News reported Tuesday.

The service plans to deploy Area-I’s Air-Launched, Tube-Integrated Unmanned System or ALTIUS from a UH-60 Black Hawk aircraft to provide an understanding on how launching drones at low-altitude can be applied in the battlefield.

Layne Merritt, chief engineer at the Aviation and Missile Research, Development and Engineering Center of the Army’s Aviation Development Directorate, stated that the demonstration will inform scientists about the air flows, interfaces and launch dynamics of the entire system to prepare for the actual launch.

The Army intends to use rocket pods or a Hellfire launcher that can deploy the UAS from a helicopter once the first test is completed.

Merritt said the Army envisions that future drones will be directly ejected from planes so that they can be used for missions beyond surveillance and limited attacks, which is what they are currently used for.

Area-I developed ALTIUS in 2011 under a U.S. Air Force Small Business Innovation Research contract.

The UAS is initially designed to perform information, surveillance and reconnaissance operations.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology has introduced an initiative that aims to facilitate federal technology transfer in an effort to accelerate the transition of new products to market, build up the U.S. economy and support national security efforts.

NIST said Tuesday it launched the Return on Investment initiative at the Unleashing American Innovation symposium on April 19 in Washington in order to meet the Lab-to-Market cross-agency priority goal with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy as part of the President’s Management Agenda.

“It’s time to re-examine our regulations, practices and laws to better promote technology transfer and the commercialization of innovative technologies,” Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said at the symposium.

“We want to maximize the impact of the federal R&D investment and knowledge exchange between the public and private sectors to continue to boost U.S. competitiveness in global markets,” Ross added.

NIST issued a request for information Tuesday to collect public feedback on federal tech transfer and the public’s capacity to work with federally funded research-and-development centers and laboratories through licensing and partnerships.

Public comments on the RFI are due July 30, according to the Federal Register notice.

NIST will also hold public forums in May and June in San Jose, Calif., Denver, Chicago and Gaithersburg, Md., to seek recommendations and feedback on federal tech transfer.

The Defense Department could be the first user of self-driving vehicles that run on artificial intelligence platforms in support of logistics operations, Bloomberg reported Monday.

“We’re going to have self-driving vehicles in theater for the Army before we’ll have self-driving cars on the streets,” Michael Griffin, defense undersecretary for research and engineering, told lawmakers at a congressional hearing in April.

“But the core technologies will be the same,” he added.

Griffin, a 2018 Wash100 recipient, noted that service personnel who perform fuel and food deliveries and provide other logistics support account for at least 50 percent of casualties on the battlefield.

“If that can be done by an automated unmanned vehicle with a relatively simple AI driving algorithm where I don’t have to worry about pedestrians and road signs and all of that, why wouldn’t I do that?,” he added.

Some of the tech companies that develop self-driving vehicles include General Motors, Alphabet’s Waymo unit and Uber Technologies, according to the report.