Academic Autonomy: Students Teach Army About Rapid Prototyping.

• Author: Carberry, Sean

Novi, Michigan -- Whether it is through new offices contracting methods or digital prototyping, the Army is trying to speed up the development and deployment of new vehicle technologies. A team of university students just might have a thing or two to teach the service.

Master's degree students in Clemson University's automotive engineering department took a set of requirements and about $1.5 million from the Army Combat Capabilities Development Command's Ground Vehicle Systems Center--or GVSC --and 18 months later unveiled Deep Orange 13, a fully autonomous, high-speed, off-road vehicle.

The 3,500-kilogram, non-combat vehicle--a green, boxy, tracked platform about the size of a sport utility vehicle festooned with cameras and sensors--debuted recently at the Ground Vehicle Systems Engineering and Technology Symposium organized by the Michigan chapter of the National Defense Industrial Association.

"When we first started the project, they gave us a lot of requirements that they were really looking for as far as gradeability and water fording depth," said Christian Johnson, student project manager for Deep Orange 13. The vehicle was designed to address two mission scenarios, he added.

The first scenario the Army provided was a post-snowstorm operation where the vehicle has to traverse off-road terrain to deliver 600 kilograms of supplies and supplemental electricity to civilians in need. The second scenario was an urban reconnaissance mission where the vehicle has to navigate flood waters, identify and geotag victims within a five-kilometer radius and deliver relief supplies in a 48-hour period without refueling.

The students started their design with no preconceptions about form, drive system or other technologies, said Anirudh Sundar, Clemson graduate student and chief vehicle engineer.

"We tried to quantify all this using metrics to sort of justify every decision that is taken on the vehicle, whether it is the choice of tracks versus wheels or whether it is a choice of the powertrain architecture, or whether it is the choice of the kind of cooling system you use," he said.

"Every aspect of this vehicle goes through a systems engineering approach, where we arrive at a decision matrix of all the possible alternatives that can be used and then weigh that against the value it adds to the project," he added.

From there, the students began making decisions and mapping out the basic configuration using computer-aided design. It began to take...