Competitors in the first DARPA FANG Challenge have been feverishly preparing designs in the quest to create the mobility and drivetrain systems of a next-generation, amphibious infantry fighting vehicle.

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To this point we have only broadly presented the requirements for FANG Challenge #1. With the start of the competition approaching in January and hundreds of competitors already signed up, we want to provide a greater understanding of what participants in FANG Challenge #1 can expect.

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If you are tuned into the FANG Challenge activities and registered to receive the FANG Challenge newsletters, you might recall that Newsletter #4 addressed the Component, Context, and Manufacturing Model Library (C2M2L). The C2M2L will reduce the design burden and make participation in the FANG Challenges easier for participants. This newsletter provides some further details on C2M2L, and how FANG Challenge participants will use them.

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Defense manufacturing today has two basic approaches to manufacturing complex defense engineering systems, such as infantry fighting vehicles. The first is prototype construction, where a labor-intensive approach results in a handful of test articles. The second is large-scale manufacturing, where a capital-intensive facility efficiently produces one design quickly and repeatably, but is incapable of building other designs of similar systems without significant time and expense. The iFAB (Instant Foundry Adaptive through Bits) Foundry program is an attempt to merge the adaptability of the first approach with the speed and repeatability of the second.

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The FANG Challenges hope to involve a broad, diverse design community interested in the engineering of a new infantry fighting vehicle. Concurrently, all involved need to be aware of export controls, and in a defense research environment such as the FANG Challenges, the statute of reference is the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR). As indicated in forthcoming documentation, challenge participants will be responsible for complying with ITAR restrictions.

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This edition of the newsletter details C2M2L, which is the library that contains the different models competitors will use to create designs in the FANG Challenges. The last newsletter explained META as the software tools that will utilize the C2M2L models, and the following is an explanation of C2M2L and its individual parts

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What is META? - META provides the set of tools FANG competitors will use when they design, simulate, verify and submit drivetrain designs in VehicleFORGE during the first FANG challenge. The FANG Challenges will be the first test, at scale, of META, one of the research components of DARPA's AVM portfolio. The META tools have been designed to transform how defense systems are engineered, integrated and tested.

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At DARPA we believe that to innovate, we must make, and to protect, we must produce. We must retain our ability to build things, and most importantly, we must be able to build the right systems for our nation's defense on a realistic timeline and budget. In the last half-century, however, large complex defense systems (armored vehicles, airplanes, ships, satellites) have required ever-increasing time and funding between concept and fielding-increasingly the development of these systems is cancelled due to unforeseen cost and schedule delays.

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The VehicleFORGE platform is a next generation, web-based capability that will provide collaboration tools, in some ways similar to software forges, to enable effective collaboration around full system designs in the domain of ground vehicles. The development of complex software systems has benefitted significantly from the ability to leverage crowd-sourced innovation in the form of open source code development, and we are hoping to enjoy similar benefits by incorporating aspects of this model to ultimately democratize the systems engineering design process, engaging several orders of magnitude more talent than the current industry model.

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