With a $1 million prize in the offing, more than 700 participants flexed their fingers yesterday and began collaborating in more than 150 teams to design the mobility and drive train systems of a next-generation, amphibious infantry fighting vehicle under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency FANG Challenge I.
“(Yesterday’s) launch marks a significant milestone in exploring a radically novel collaborative approach to the military vehicle design-to-production process,” said Army Lt. Col. Nathan Wiedenman, program manager in DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office. “We have the potential to create a whole new engineering and system development process, disrupting the current approach to building not only military vehicles, but all forms of complex systems.”
The goal of the competition is to compress the design-to-production time of a complex defense system by up to a factor of five, the agency said in a statement.
The designs for the Fast Adaptable Next-Generation Ground Vehicle (FANG) competition will result in a $1 million prize to the team whose design submission best achieves established requirements for performance, lead time and cost using META design tools and the VehicleFORGE collaboration environment. The winning team also will have its design constructed as an automotive test rig in the iFAB foundry.
It was in October that DARPA called on innovators with expertise within and outside the traditional defense industry to register for the expected three challenges (Defense Daily, Oct. 3).
A year earlier, DARPA had called for innovators for complex defense systems to break the design-build-test-redesign cycle (Defense Daily, Nov. 3, 2011).
A second DARPA-hosted FANG Challenge is expected in early 2014, focusing on chassis, structural and survivability subsystems, potentially culminating with another $1 million prize. A third and final FANG Challenge which would result in a full vehicle design, is anticipated in early 2015, with a $2 million award.