The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is seeking to replicate the open source software development model for the design of vehicles.

In a broad agency announcement released Oct. 22, DARPA says it wants to create a vehicleforge.mil website that allows collaborators to design cyber-electromechanical devices just as coders create applications on sourceforge.net.

Cyber-electromechanical devices are so called because they contain software, electronic and mechanical components.

The principal technical challenge associated with translating the open source method to the physical world is "a general representation language that is rich enough to describe a broad range of cyber-electro-mechanical systems, yet formal enough that the system can be 'compiled' or verified in some manner when a design change is made to some element or aspect of it," the announcement states.

To that end, DARPA also released earlier this year two announcements (known as Meta and Meta-II) that seek, among other objectives, to develop such a metalanguage.

The main challenge facing the eventual web developer of vehicleforge.mil will be to find a way to credential contributors in such a way that contributors wouldn't necessarily have to be U.S. citizens or hold a security clearance. DARPA says it needs some level of assurance that participants don't deliver malicious contributions and won't re-disseminate vehicleforge.mil designs elsewhere--but the website should allow for more grassroots participation than a security clearance requirement would allow, the announcement states.

For more:
- go to the vehicleforge.mil broad agency announcement

Related Articles:
DARPA in pursuit of insider threats
Robot farmers and psychiatrists coming in a not-so distant future