A press release from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency:
The technology research arm of the Department of Defense recently launched a portfolio of programs aimed at creating efficiency and reducing time it takes to build complex defense systems.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) introduced the Adaptive Vehicle Make (AVM) that upgrades DARPA’s “1960s-vintage” approaches to management by fundamentally changing the way systems are designed, built and verified. Now DARPA believes the AVM portfolio will compress development timelines by at least five times.
“DARPA’s goal is to replicate the success of the integrated circuit industry in coping with rapidly growing product complexity by moving to higher levels of abstraction in design, introducing design automation and model-based verification and decoupling the design and build phases of the development process,” said Paul Eremenko, DARPA program manager, in a statement.
The AVM Approach
The AVM portfolio is composed of four synergistic efforts: META, Instant Foundry Adaptive through Bits (iFAB), Fast Adaptive Next-Generation Ground Combat Vehicle (FANG) and Manufacturing Experimentation and Outreach (MENTOR), which will culminate in the development of a next generation infantry fighting vehicle.
META was launched earlier this year as a program that develops metrics, a representation metalanguage, design tools, and verification techniques. This program intends to enable a synthesis of vehicle designs that are “correct-by-construction”, rather than “design-build-test-redesign” loop that often increases cost and schedule growth.
iFAB is a “foundry-style” manufacturing approach that incorporates the processes behind a modern integrated circuit manufacturing plants, which are automated, adaptable and capable of producing a broad spectrum of products, according to DARPA.
The culmination of the AVM is the FANG program, which will leverage both the META and iFAB capabilities to produce an infantry fighting vehicle. Fang also will be an open source collaborative infrastructure for crowd-sourcing vehicle designs, called vehicleforge.mil. The site – expected to be online in 2011-12, will represent designs and will include version control and “branching” features similar to those found in open-source software forge sites—all in an effort to enable thousands across the globe to contribute to vehicle designs.
DARPA is planning on implementing a series of “Adaptive Make Challenges”, or prize-based competitions with winning designs manufactured in iFAB. Winners may even find their designs will be evaluated against Army prototypes. DARPA hopes this will generate a renewed interest in the manufacturing field and foster a next generation cadre of innovators.
Through the MENTOR effort, students will engage in a distributed design and manufacturing experiment that utilizes social media tools to collaborate, develop and build vehicles such as mobile robots.
“DARPA will deploy a variety of 3D printers to high schools across the country,” Eremenko said. “Our goal is a thousand schools within three years.”
