INDUSTRY news
Rock Island Arsenal to Build FANG Challenge Award Winning Design T e U.S. Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency (DARPA) awarded a $1 million prize to “Ground Systems,” a three-person team with members in Ohio, Texas and California, as the winner of its Fast Adaptable Next-Generation Ground Vehicle (FANG) Mobility/ Drivetrain Challenge. T e drivetrain challenge was the fi rst of three steps in the program, which will culminate in the full amphibious military vehicle design. T e winning FANG design will be
Team Ground Systems’ fi nal drivetrain design received the highest score when measured against the established requirements for system performance and manufacturability.
built by the DARPA iFAB program team. iFAB, or Instant Foundry Adap- tive through Bits, is led by the Applied Research Laboratory at Penn State Univ. and will validate the manu- facturability feedback, casting con- fi guration and instruction generation tools as part of the build process. T e as-built design will be subjected to test and evaluation under the leadership of the FANG performer, Ricardo Inc. of Van Buren Township, Mich. Among the project partners in-
volved in casting, machining and fab- ricating the metal vehicle components is Rock Island Arsenal, Rock Island, Ill., where the fi nal vehicle assembly will take place. “T e iFAB Foundry will help
revolutionize the design and building process for complex defense systems with the goal of shortening develop- ment time by a factor of fi ve,” accord- ing to Mark Traband, who heads up the Manufacturing Systems Division of Penn State’s Applied Research Laboratory. “We want to move away from a capital-intensive manufactur- ing facility aimed at one product and toward fl exible, programmable, dis- tributed production that can accom- modate many systems and variations and reconfi gure quickly.” T e iFAB vision is to create a
fl exible, programmable, potentially dis- tributed production capability able to accommodate a wide range of systems and system variants with extremely rapid reconfi guration timescales. T e FANG program will test
specially developed META design tools, model libraries and the Ve- hicleFORGE collaboration platform, which were created to signifi cantly compress the design-to-production time of a complex defense system.
MEDIA RESOURCE
Visit
metalcastingtv.com to watch a video about the FANG Challenge.
12 | METAL CASTING DESIGN & PURCHASING | Jul/Aug 2013
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