The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is an agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of new technology for use by the military. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Experimental Crowd-derived Combat-support Vehicle (XC2V) Design Challenge, launched on February 3 was an attempt to discover how novel a concept a crowd could come up with, in how much time.

The XC2V Design Challenge asked individuals to co-create a vehicle body design for two different missions—Combat Reconnaissance and Combat Delivery & Evacuation.

Local Motors, which has been enormously successful at crowd sourcing designs and going on to realizing the product stepped up to the challenge. As is tradition at Local Motors (LM), a design competition was hosted, a number of entries registered, then members of the community chipped in with their suggestions on each entry in a phase known as ‘Checkup’ thereby helping the contestant optimize his/her design and finally, winners were selected by a voting process that has vastly evolved over the last few competitions held by LM.

Voting ended on March 10, 2011. The entries that rose to the top included innovations for modularity, increased visibility, unique personnel carrying strategies, optimal equipment usage, and ease of ingress and egress. The winner was Victor Garcia, for his concept named ‘Flypmode’.

The Press Release concludes,

“The next research question becomes, how could crowd-sourced selection contribute to the goals of Defense manufacturing? Fundamental questions remain regarding the role of diversity vice expertise in such design and selection tasks. In the coming weeks DARPA will include potential vehicle end users in alternative engagements. This follow-on study seeks more answers and may allow for a second vehicle to be built. Side-by-side evaluation between crowd-selected and end-user-selected vehicles will be conducted.”

 

Do visit Local Motors at www.local-motors.com for more such crowd sourced designs. LM’s Rally Fighter is another successfully completed project that has found a number of buyers, each Rally Fighter customized to the owners preference. The customization again, is of course crowd sourced! The Engineering and Build stage of the Rally Fighter have been well documented, a must see for any auto enthusiast!

Source:
DARPA Press Release
Local Motors