The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) plans two events around its desire for new innovative sources–companies and individuals–who may be outside the traditional defense industry to help revolutionize the design and manufacturing process for complex defense systems.
DARPA expects to pioneer new ways for correct-by-construction fab-less design and a digitally programmable foundry-like manufacturing capability to break the traditional systems engineering paradigm and replace it with one that eliminates multiple iterations of the design-build-test-redesign cycle, the agency said in a statement.
The goal is to significantly reduce the timeline and increase the efficiency of the development and build process for complex defense systems.
DARPA will hold Proposers’ Day events focused on the latest efforts within its Adaptive Vehicle Make (AVM) portfolio–iFAB Foundry and Fast Adaptive Next-Generation Ground Vehicle (FANG). The two events aim to familiarize potential participants who have not previously done business with DARPA, including small businesses in the manufacturing sector, with its interest in revolutionary approaches to the design and manufacturing of complex systems, as well as to promote understanding of current and future research and development opportunities in this area.
DARPA program manager for AVM Paul Eremenko will introduce draft Broad Agency Announcements for the iFAB Foundry and FANG, solicit inputs from participants and answer questions.
The first event will be held via interactive webcast on Nov. 10. The second, in-person event will be held on Dec. 12 in Arlington, Va. Both sessions will cover the same information.
“We’re looking to reduce the time it takes us to develop the latest generation of advanced defense systems by at least five-fold,” Eremenko said. “To do this, we must tap into sophisticated new design and manufacturing approaches, but also the tremendous energy and innovation of groups that DARPA has not traditionally engaged. We need to think differently about military manufacturing if we want to get valuable new technologies quickly deployed into the field to meet the warfighters’ needs. The current multi-step, multi-year processes are too time consuming and costly, and with the AVM program, we’re tackling this problem head on.”
DARPA has made significant progress on META and other programs in the AVM portfolio over the last year.
During that time, DARPA has awarded contracts to Local Motors, Dassault Systemes, GE Research, Georgia Tech, Vanderbilt University, the University of Pennsylvania, Boeing [BA], Carnegie Mellon University, Intentional Software, Penn State Applied Research Lab, the University of Delaware and O’Reilly Media to perform various tasks in support of AVM.
For more information: http://www.darpa.mil/NewsEvents/Releases/2011/10/31.aspx.