The U.S. Army plans to conduct a series of demonstrations by the summer of 2017 at Fort Benning in Georgia in order to assess the potential role of combat vehicles as “robotic wingmen,” Defense News reported Wednesday.

Gen. Michael Lundy, commanding general at the Army’s Combined Arms Center in Kansas, told reporters that the service branch plans to equip an Abrams tank with a robotic loader and allow the weapons loader to control unmanned ground and aerial systems, Jen Judson writes.

The Army will also use Humvees and M113 armored vehicles to demonstrate the robotic wingman concept in order to facilitate the development of programs of record for both semiautonomous and autonomous wingmen, according to the service branch’s slides presented during a capabilities data exchange between industry and the Army Training and Doctrine Command in Virginia.

The semiautonomous robotic platform is set to enter the program of record in 2023 and would allow the combat vehicles to perform obstacle detection and avoidance as well as navigation functions, Judson reports.

The Army expects the autonomous wingman to be a program of record by 2035 and would be equipped with teleoperated weapons and navigation capability, the report added.

The U.S. Air Force has partnered with Engility to conduct a cyber risk audit of the service branch’s over 100 command-and-control systems as well as battle situation awareness platforms, Federal News Radio reported Tuesday.

The military branch previously awarded the company a potential $31 million contract as part of the Defense Department’s efforts to build up the systems’ cyber defense capabilities.

Scott Maucione writes the Air Force will work to evaluate the systems and ensure that they comply with the security controls of the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

“If we are conducting assessments across three or four enterprise level command and control systems, if we see trends in that particular area then we will work with our customer to help make recommendations so the various program managers can implement the correct security controls,” said Floyd McKinney, director for cyber at Engility.

Maucione reported the company will focus the audits on C2 systems’ software and hardware under the contract with the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center, which is part of the Defense Technical Information Center.

Air Force program managers will collaborate with Engility in order to get the authority-to-operate certificate that would ensure that cyber risks are mitigated and security controls for the systems are implemented and verified independently, according to the report.

A team of scientists has started to develop a system that aims to identify mosquito-borne viruses and other pathogens as well as determine potential disease outbreaks through a project funded by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, New Republic reported Dec. 20.

Eamonn Keogh, a computer science and engineering professor at the University of California in Riverside, and fellow researchers convened at Microsoft’s headquarters to create a bug trap that works to attract mosquitoes through emission of signals under the IARPA-backed Project Premonition, Cynthia Graber writes.

The LED-based bug trap has 60 compartments, sensors that work to identify the mosquitoes and other insects through a series of calculations and a trapdoor that closes once it identifies the right species.

“It takes the insects about one-twentieth of a second to fly past the LED beam,” Keogh said.

“And at the end of the one-twentieth of a second, we already know what it is.”

Project Premonition also involves the use of a drone that collects and brings the bug trap to a mother ship for analysis of disease markers, Graber reports.

Keogh and other scientists expect the bug trap system to be operational in the next five years, according to New Republic.