Darpa to the People: You Think It Up, We Make Sure It Shoots

By JEFFERY DELVISCIO

Most of us know what the term “crowdsourcing” means. It's been around for more than five years now, and it's been used to tackle big, complex tasks ranging from finding many people (after natural disasters) to finding one (after a plane crash). It's been used for everyday problems like traffic and to answer scientific research questions. Crowdsourcing has even been used to make things, from books to videos.

Up until now, the use of everyday people to solve big problems has been mostly a civilian activity. But the military has recently come around, looking to the masses outside the uniformed ranks for new ideas. On Wednesday, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, called for just that kind of help on Twitter:

Do you have what it takes to design the next infantry fighting vehicle? Find out at vehicleforge.org #AVM_FANG

- DARPA (@DARPA) Augus t 15, 2012

Darpa is trying to harness the nonmilitary crowds to build what it's calling a “next-generation amphibious infantry fighting vehicle.” The larger project is called “Fast, Adaptable, Next-Generation Ground Vehicle,” or FANG. (Darpa is also great at making catchy, dangerous-sounding acronyms.) There are prizes, and Darpa plans to crowdsource the vehicle from struts to nuts: drivetrain ($1 million for winning design), chassis ($1 million), “total platform” ($2 million).

The agency is starting with the drivetrain, which is open to “U.S. citizens and U.S. persons,” and the other pieces have yet to be announced. But the vehicle is just the ends. Part of the selling point is that the actual collaboration platform will be all virtual. Contributors design the pieces of the vehicle as code that then gets plugged into the Darpa software “engine” and simulated.

This crowd call is not the first for the agency, which has be en around since the time of Sputnik. Last year, it announced a similar competition to develop a “Combat Reconnaissance and Combat Delivery & Evacuation” vehicle.

Here's the one that won:

At the time, the price for a winning design was $7,500.