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"  The defense research group DARPA wants better vehicles, and it wants them faster and cheaper. To make it happen, the Pentagon&amp;#039;s mad scientists are taking a cue from computer-circuit builders. During the 1980s, the integrated-circuit-manufacturing industry began a sea change away from the traditional manufacturing model: Design was separated from manufacturing as a stand-alone function, with designers outsourcing manufacturing to dedicated fabrication plants, or fabs. The result has been an industry more responsive to the rapid pace of innovation that we all know and love today.  DARPA helped bring about that computing revolution and now aims to do the same thing to vehicle design. Announced last year, DARPA&amp;#039;s Adaptive Vehicle Make program, or AVM, is a suite of interlocking programs that are &amp;quot;trying to enhance the adaptability of our military forces by compressing the development timelines for complex defense systems by at least five times,&amp;quot; program manager Paul Eremenko says. To DARPA, the way to build the vehicles of the future is to reinvent the way vehicles today are designed and built.  AVM includes: META, for designing and testing the integration of vehicle parts using software alone; iFAB, for building the newly designed vehicles created with META in a factory that can quickly be adapted to new vehicle designs; and FANG, a challenge for crowd-sourcing a prototype military ground vehicle\u2014a vehicle whose design and manufacture will put the whole system to the test. In late 2015, if all goes well, says Theodore Bapty, electrical engineering professor at Vanderbilt University, where META is coming together, the finished vehicle &amp;quot;goes to the Marines and then they beat the hell out of it. They drive it out in the ocean at Camp Pendleton in San Diego.&amp;quot; How It Works Mike Jackson, director of North American vehicle production and forecasting at analyst firm IHS, says that the current automotive supply chain is a mess. Numerous component suppliers work in a constant and time-consuming give-and-take with manufacturers, and regulations\u2014which require lengthy and expensive testing to meet fuel-economy, environmental, and other government standards\u2014are major hurdles to overcome. The first step in DARPA&amp;#039;s plan to do away with that madness is to digitize design. And so Bapty and his colleagues at Vanderbilt and elsewhere have to create computational models of vehicle components\u2014models that currently exist only in incomplete form. CAD models are typically used in the design of new parts. But those models don&amp;#039;t include all the other data that will be required to test their integration and interaction with other parts in virtual environments prior to manufacture. Army Lt. Col. Nathan Wiedenman, DARPA deputy program manager for AVM, explains: &amp;quot;We are building libraries of component, context, and manufacturing process models.&amp;quot; The models, he says, &amp;quot;might be of an engine or a generator or even a piston ring.&amp;quot; Whether a given part is to be purchased off the shelf, milled, or 3D-printed in iFAB, the digital model of it needs to be so detailed that during META testing it will accurately depict how the real-world part will interact with all the other components. &amp;quot;The ultimate objective,&amp;quot; Eremenko says, &amp;quot;is that the vehicle that is built in iFAB is fully functional\u2014avoiding the traditional design-build-test-redesign iteration that occurs with traditional prototyping.&amp;quot; If it works, the system will enable designers to put together a vehicle in META, test it within the system, and then output the design directly to iFAB (which will be built in Rock Island, Ill.), with no intervening steps. It&amp;#039;s a process that might amount to something like word processing for the manufacture of complex machinery, in this case, vehicles.  For FANG, the final part of the AVM program, members of the public will be invited to contribute to the design of the eventual vehicle, &amp;quot;a heavy and potentially amphibious infantry fighting vehicle,&amp;quot; according the program&amp;#039;s website [http://www.darpa.mil/Our_Work/TTO/Programs/Adaptive_Vehicle_Make_(AVM).aspx]. The contest will be broken down into three consecutive challenges: The first, to be launched by the end of 2012, for a drivetrain suitable for building and separate testing; the second, launched in 2013, for an armored chassis; and the final challenge for the completed vehicle to be launched in 2014. Winners of the first two challenges stand to win $1 million each, while the winner of the final challenge could take home $2 million.  Will It Work? If DARPA and its performers can pull off this experiment in crowd-sourced car building, it could revolutionize not only the automotive industry. &amp;quot;In itself, it sounds great because typically design and development is the greatest cost of a vehicle,&amp;quot; Jackson says.  But can it be done? Jay Rogers thinks so. He&amp;#039;s a former Marine and the CEO of Local Motors, which hosted DARPA&amp;#039;s XC2V program for a crowd-sourced military vehicle last year. &amp;quot;We don&amp;#039;t really have a choice,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;If we don&amp;#039;t do it, it&amp;#039;s going to be so expensive to build vehicles and they&amp;#039;re going to go so slowly that, competitively, in the world, every terrorist organization will put us out of business.&amp;quot; That&amp;#039;s because traditional contractors, with their snail&amp;#039;s-pace development cycles, can&amp;#039;t adapt to changing military requirements quickly and affordably enough. Millitary requirements are, of course, different from the desires of consumers driving the commercial vehicle market, but the same principles apply, Rogers says. He says smaller, faster, cheaper manufacturers will be able to get to market with the latest and greatest tech much more quickly than mainline traditional automakers. The big guys will have to change their way of doing business to survive. Eremenko says the open-source model of design has advantages that outweigh any potential security risks. &amp;quot;Security concerns are foremost,&amp;quot; he says, and while &amp;quot;there will certainly be portions of the vehicle that are off-limits to crowd sourcing, several decades of experience with open-source software development suggest that open-source projects tend to yield products that are actually more reliable than closed developments.&amp;quot; Open-source tech breaks less often, Eremenko says, because there are potentially thousands of developers going over it with fine-toothed combs for bugs, as opposed to just the few that even the largest companies can afford to have working on closed projects. DARPA says it and its AVM contractors will also research new security protocols that are better suited to crowd-sourced projects than the more conventional security clearances in use for traditional military manufacturing. The public face of the project will come together in a website to be hosted at vehicleforge.mil and launched this summer in preparation for the start of the first FANG challenge, which is slated to begin this fall or early winter. Gentlemen, start your computers. Michael Belfiore is the author of The Department of Mad Scientists: How DARPA Is Remaking Our World, from the Internet to Artificial Limbs and is a frequent PM contributor. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a7428/adaptive-vehicle-make-darpas-plan-to-revolutionize-auto-manufacturing-6646618/>