The story is explained by Government Computer News GCN.

UK defence industry suppliers have long cast 'grass in the neighbouring field is greener' glances at DARPA's funding approaches, which in one area (compound semiconductors) boosted the US into world leadership in a matter of a few years of strategic funding after it had substantially lagged the world for a considerable time. Ministry of Defence (MoD) has seen the appeal of DARPA's approach having even emerged with its Grand Challenge on a rather similar programme to the one that ran in the US.

Now the sprightly minded DARPA has launched several programs to dramatically compress the development timelines for complex defense systems, a new approach expected to significantly improve programs’ abilities to handle complexity, which has been rapidly overwhelming the 1960s-era methods of management and it will use the integrated circuit industry as an example for its ability to cope with ever more complex products.

The electronics industry moved to higher levels of abstraction in design, introduced design automation, model-based verification, decoupled the design & build phases of the development process, said programme manager, (right) Paul Eremenko, who also handles the InSPIRE program which is a set of experiments employing the SPHERES  testbed on the International Space Station (ISS) with the principal objectives of advancing science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education and crowd-sourcing.

DARPA's Adaptive Vehicle Make (AVM) portfolio will change the way systems are designed, built and verified. The AVM portfolio consists of four efforts. These are META; Instant Foundry Adaptive through Bits (iFAB); Fast Adaptive Next Generation Ground Combat Vehicle (FANG); and Manufacturing Experimentation and Outreach (MENTOR). comprise the portfolio.

Combining these programs efforts will result in development of a next generation infantry fighting vehicle. Eremenko says the aggregate goal of AVM is to compress development times by a factor of five, 'democratise' the development process and inspire and educate the next generation manufacturing innovators.

DARPA launched META, the first of the AVM efforts, earlier this year. META is to develop metrics, a representational meta-language, design tools, and verification techniques to permit synthesis of vehicle designs that are correct by the time of construction.

Eremenko said META will create a toolset that will allow the development of complex military vehicles, avoiding the design-build-test-redesign loop, that leads to cost overruns and schedule extensions.

The iFAB system will complement META’s  design capability with a foundry style manufacturing approach. The goal is to develop a bitstream-programmable manufacturing facility capable of rapid reconfiguration to produce new designs or design variations, with almost no user learning curve.

Eremenko described this  as “large-scale manufacturing in quantities of one.” An iFAB facility will be the defense industry’s analog to modern integrated circuit manufacturing, automated, adaptable and able to produce a variety of products.

The AVM program culminates in FANG, which will leverage META and iFAB capabilities to produce an infantry fighting vehicle.  DARPA  has another goal in mind for FANG and seeks to expand the number of contributors in the design process by orders or magnitude, the “democratising innovation.” process.

DARPA will develop a collaborative infrastructure for crowd sourcing vehicle designs named vehicleforge.mil. (left)

The agency anticipates that the site will use the META metalanguage to represent designs and will include version control and “branching” features similar to those found in open source software forge sites. By crowdsourcing the design process, DARPA expects to enable thousands of engineers from around the world to contribute to vehicle designs.

Eremenko added that DARPA is also exploring new mechanisms for credentialing users and for ensuring the integrity of the final design.

Vehicleforge.mil is expected to be operational in 2011-2012, with DARPA planning a series of Adaptive Make Challenges — prize-based competitions of increasing complexity with winning designs manufactured in iFAB. The winning models may ultimately be evaluated against Army prototypes, he said.

Through the AVM program, DARPA also hopes to create renewed interest in manufacturing and foster a new generation of inventors. The agency will deploy a number of 3D printers to a thousand high schools across the United States over three years.

Under the MENTOR effort, students will participate in a distributed design and manufacturing experiment using conventional social media tools to collaborate across schools and to develop and build vehicles such as mobile robots and go-carts.