Adaptive Vehicle Make

Adaptive Vehicle Make (AVM) was a portfolio of programs overseen by DARPA, of the United States Department of Defense. AVM attempted to address revolutionary approaches to the design, verification, and manufacturing of complex defense systems and vehicles. The three primary programs were META, Instant Foundry Adaptive through Bits (iFAB), and Fast Adaptable Next-Generation Ground Vehicle (FANG GV) programs. Many components of the program leveraged crowdsourcing and were open source and the ultimate intent was to crowdsource a next generation combat vehicle. The program was managed by Nathan Wiedenman under DARPA's Tactical Technology Office. A Proposer's Day was held and several Broad Agency Announcements released on 7 October 2010. The AVM program was ended in February 2014 without building and testing a complete vehicle.

A frequently cited criticism of the DoD is the expensive and often inefficient way that it buys and builds new things. The scope of this process can be seen in the Integrated Defense Acquisition, Technology, & Logistics Life Cycle Management Framework. One of the big challenges associated with these processes is the craftsmen-like nature of building these complex cyber-mechanical systems. A typical approach is to break the system into subsystems and have separate teams embark on building the individual subsystems and optimize them for Size, Weight, and Power. Once the subsystems reach a reasonable level of development, an integration effort takes place to tie the subsystems together. The system is then tested against requirements which are almost never met on the first integration-testing cycle. The steps will then be iterated until the system meets its requirements.

This is a costly approach, especially compared with something like chip production. Intel, for instance, has an excellent track record in getting systems right in the design phase so that extensive testing and integration are not needed. This "correct-by-construction" methodology is powerful and would not be possible without high-level design languages to support validation and verification. The goal of the AVM program was to move to this model for building large, complex, heterogeneous cyber-mechanical systems for increased cost and schedule efficiencies.

The goal of META was to analyse interactions between components and provide verification and validation (V&V) of designs without prototyping in order to shorten development time. META was to develop new languages or language extensions (Generic Modeling Environment and CyPhyML) that encapsulated sufficient complexity to compile a component library, context library, and manufacturing library for this type of analysis and certification. META I began in mid-2010 and was scheduled to last 15 months. META II was to begin in late 2010 and last 12 months. An infantry fighting vehicle library was to be compiled in late 2011 and continue for 1.5 years.

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