The Department of Defense plans to use crowdsourcing as part of the development of its Fast, Adaptable, Next-generation Ground (FANG) vehicle.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded the engineering firm Ricardo Inc. a $9.8 million contract to develop and produce the FANG. The vehicle will mirror the Marine Corps Amphibious Combat Vehicle, an assault vehicle that can travel on land or water and has direct fire, indirect fire, and landmine threat capabilities.
As part of the FANG development process, Ricardo must stage a series of challenge competitions with other engineers and designers to come up with "progressively more complex vehicle subsystems," according to DARPA. The result of these competitions, which will award about $4 million, will be a full infantry fighting vehicle (IFV).
An artist's rendering of a combat fighting vehicle that could be designed through DARPA's FANG (Fast, Adaptable, Next-generation Ground) vehicle program. (Source: DARPA)
Three specific challenges are associated with the program, according to DARPA. The first will ask designers to create a mobility/drivetrain automotive rig for an IFV. The second will call for the design of a vehicle chassis/survivability suite that will be tested for static and dynamic structural properties and a demonstrated ability to incorporate modular bolt-on armor, as well as other survivability features. A third challenge -- for which DARPA will award $2 million of the total prize money -- will ask engineers to create a full IFV design aside from the command, control, communications, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance suite.
To compete in the FANG challenges, designers and engineers will use tools set up by DARPA to make the process more collaborative and open to innovation, even from nontraditional designers. Those resources include design tools developed through DARPA's META program and its vehicleforge.mil collaboration environment.
This is really an interesting application for crowd sourcing. Since it is a public venture, we should be able to see a little more clearly if it works (as opposed to a private company trying it). What is really surprising is that in the past a lot of what they are sending out to everybody would have been extremely classified for the people working on it.
I'm very interested to see how effective crowdsourcing design process will be on this project. We all have heard how military budgets can have schedule delays and cost overruns, so I would like to see if this new design technique will have an impact in this area.
Looks like DARPA continues to push the envelope in terms of leveraging crowdsourcing techniques to push combat vehicle design. The agency appeared to have enjoyed some pretty strong success teaming up with Local Motors on another combat vehicle, the XC2V, which was designed and built via the crowdsourcing approach in under six months. In fact, that project led President Obama to cite Local Motors' development approach as a model for American manufacturing innovation in a speech last summer.
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