Automation Technologies

For the more than 700 registered competitors, the journey to winning DARPA’s first FANG Challenge begins today. After months of planning and organizing into more than 150 teams, participants from across the United States will begin collaborating on mobility and drivetrain subsystem designs for the Fast Adaptable Next-Generation Ground Vehicle (FANG). At the end of the competition, DARPA plans to award a $1 million prize to the team whose design submission best achieves established requirements for performance, lead time and cost using the META design tools and the VehicleFORGE collaboration environment. The winning team will also have its design constructed as an automotive test rig in the iFAB foundry.

In the world of network cyber security, the weak link is often not the hardware or the software, but the user. Passwords are often easily guessed or possibly written down, leaving entire networks vulnerable to attack. Mobile devices containing sensitive information are often lost or stolen, leaving a password as the single layer of defense.

Today, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) awarded a $1 million prize to “Ground Systems”, a 3-person team with members in Ohio, Texas and California, as the winner of the Fast Adaptable Next-Generation Ground Vehicle (FANG) Mobility/Drivetrain Challenge. Team Ground Systems’ final design submission received the highest score when measured against the established requirements for system performance and manufacturability.

Military operations depend upon the unimpeded flow of accurate and relevant information to support timely decisions related to battle planning and execution. To address these needs, numerous intelligence systems and technologies have been developed over the past 20 years, but each of these typically provides only a partial picture of the battlefield, and integrating the information has proven to be burdensome and inefficient.

Bonnie Dorr (left), program manager in DARPA’s Information Innovation Office (I2O), shakes hands with Henry Kautz, past president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), upon her recent induction as an AAAI Fellow. Each year, AAAI bestows the lifetime honor of Fellow on only a handful of researchers for their exceptional leadership, research and service contributions to the field of artificial intelligence.