Technology being developed in a nondescript office building in Reston could change how Army soldiers train for and operate in combat thousands of miles away. The Army's Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) runs on a pair of Microsoft goggles and links to a microsized drone that flies autonomously and collects video analyzed in real time by artificial intelligence algorithms trained to identify threats, like an enemy combatant with an assault rifle coming around a corner, or a vehicle of interest. Detections are sent to a heads-up display within the goggles and are shared across a squad. "It can all be done at the tactical edge out on the battlefield, using new-edge computing technologies, which basically puts the power of a supercomputer in the soldiers' hands," says Rob Albritton, a vice president at Reston-based Octo who heads up the AI Center of Excellence at the federal contractor's oLabs tech accelerator. Octo has been working on developing AI technology for IVAS since 2020 and is currently working with about 20 government agencies on a variety of other AI projects.

TALLAHASSEE, FLORIDA – Florida could turn to the sky to fight Burmese pythons on the ground under a bill a Senate committee unanimously approved Monday to allow two state agencies to use drones in the effort to eradicate invasive plants and animals. The bill would create an exception to a current law that prohibits law enforcement from using drones to gather information and bans state agencies from using drones to gather images on private land. It would allow the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and the Florida Forest Service to fly drones to manage and eradicate invasion species on public lands. Sen. Ben Albritton said he has been told that drones equipped with lidar, which stands for "light detection and ranging," might be able to identify pythons. "As you know, chasing those nasty critters down there in the Everglades is a difficult task," Albritton said.

Since 2006, improvised explosive devices have killed more than 1,000 U.S. troops in Iraq as small groups of U.S. soldiers routinely travel in convoys on bomb-ridden roads, according to Congressional Research Service data. But General Motors is developing commercial vehicle technology that could dramatically lower the casualty count from IEDs. In fact, GM is gambling that it has a lot of technology that the military will want to buy. For example, "GM has demonstrated leader-follower capability," GM Defense President David Albritton told the Free Press. Leader-follower means a manned vehicle leads a dozen unmanned vehicles using GM's self-driving vehicle technology.