Teams look to crowd-source military vehicle design.

• Author: Beidel, Eric
• Position: Defense Technology Newswire

Three research groups are developing web-based systems that will enable disparate design teams to collaborate on future military vehicles.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has given contracts to the Georgia Institute of Technology, Vanderbilt University and General Electric to come up with open-source software that allows for easy wide-spread collaboration.

The goal of the program, dubbed Vehicle-Forge, is to create a secure central website and other online tools that would facilitate the development of vehicle concepts. It is part of a four-year, $10 million DARPA effort to foster novel approaches to the design and manufacturing of defense systems and vehicles.

"The aim here is to fundamentally change the way in which complex systems are taken from concept to reality," said Jack Zentner, a senior research engineer leading the team at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "By enabling many designers in varied locations to work together in a distributed manner, we're confident that vehicles, and eventually other systems, can be developed with greater speed and better results."

The core website, to be located at vehicleforge.mil, will allow individuals and teams to share data, models and ideas to improve the design process. It will help bridge the gap between large corporations with significant resources and small innovative groups with different skill sets and experiences, researchers said...