The U.S. Air Force has moved forward with its fixed-wing helmet procurement effort after the military service chose a design from LIFT Airborne Technologies through a competitive solicitation.

USAF plans to hand down a decision on LIFT’s final prototype after the company completes additional studies, tests and updates of the technology, Air Combat Command said Friday.

The California-based pilot gear maker initially received an other transaction agreement in 2020 to develop a potential replacement for the branch’s aircrew helmet system that was based on a four-decade-old design.

“The legacy helmet was not originally designed to support advances in aircraft helmet-mounted display systems, causing pilots to fly with equipment not optimized for them, especially our female aircrew,” said Scott Cota, an ACC program analyst.

Capt. Timothy James, a program manager at the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center, noted that the service solicited more than 100 vendor designs through its AFWERX program and subsequently tested promising offerings from the private sector.

Proposals were evaluated against a set of criteria that includes weight, pilot comfort and capability to integrate with helmet-mounted equipment.

The branch expects to offer a contract for the production phase sometime in 2024 and intends to start its phased deployment of the new helmet with F-15E Strike Eagle pilots.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has run a series of tests to assess the performance of the robotic systems being developed under its Machine Common Sense program.

The demonstrations focused on how MCS systems grasp objects, adapt to obstacles, change speed and other capability enhancements MCS researchers put into the robotics, DARPA said Wednesday.

Mimicking child cognition’s core domains for objects, agents and places is what MCS looks to achieve in its computational model development initiative. The program researchers employed simulated training to support their efforts.

“These experiments are important milestones that get us closer to building and fielding robust robotic systems with generalized movement capabilities,” said Howard Shrobe, MCS program manager in DARPA’s Information Innovation Office.

As part of the experiments, a rapid motor adaption algorithm was created by University of California, Berkeley researchers to enable four-legged robots to adapt to and navigate through changing terrain.

Meanwhile, a bipedal robot was tested by Oregon State researchers to demonstrate its ability to use proprioceptive feedback to learn how to carry dynamic loads.

Other algorithms were developed and tested in line with the MCS program. They were trained entirely in simulation.

“By focusing on commonsense, we are creating the possibility for systems to have the flexibility of human learning and the breadth of human knowledge,” Shrobe said.

President Joe Biden on Tuesday signed into law a bipartisan bill to establish a rotation program that will provide federal civilian employees an opportunity to work at different agencies to expand their professional experience and networks as part of efforts to recruit and retain cybersecurity professionals in the federal workforce.

The Federal Rotational Cyber Workforce Program Act “will help ensure there is a pipeline of talented and qualified cybersecurity professionals who can protect our systems and prevent bad actors from stealing sensitive data and compromising national security,” Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., said in a statement published Wednesday.

Peters, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, co-authored the legislation with Sens. John Hoeven, R-N.D., and Jacky Rosen, D-Nevada.

The measure will require the Office of Personnel Management to establish policies and procedures to allow federal cybersecurity employees to be deployed at another agency for up to year and direct the Government Accountability Office to submit a congressional report on the rotational program.

Issuing regulations, training staff and preparing the needed report to Congress in support of the law’s implementation would cost less than $500,000 over the next five years starting 2022, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s cost estimate.

The U.S. Navy is set to kick off competition for a potential five-year contract for software development efforts to support the service’s forthcoming unmanned vehicle programs, Breaking Defense reported Wednesday.

Alan Baribeau, a spokesman for the Navy, said the branch’s unmanned systems program office expects to issue a solicitation for the Autonomy Baseline Manager contract in the coming months and award the contract by the summer of 2023.

The ABM contract “serves a central role” in the unmanned systems program office’s “autonomy ecosystem,” according to a slide obtained by the publication through a Freedom of Information Act request.

The service’s program office, PMS 406, has been leading several projects that seek to bring together various software and central to that effort is a software factory, dubbed Rapid Autonomy Integration Lab. The ABM contractor will work on the RAIL initiative.

“The vision for the RAIL is that many industry partners … will bring their code to the RAIL,” Capt. Pete Small, the former program manager, told the publication in 2021.

The ABM is meant to serve as “that support infrastructure to help manage the process, enforce the standards, configuration management, and just overall execution of the development and certification period and software,” added Small.