DARPA XC2V Design Challenge Finalists Announced

DARPA, one of the military organizations that for years has tried to engage the civilian brains into helping it create the war technologies of the future, has decided to take this approach one step further and announced today the initial result of a competition it likes to call Experimental Crowd-derived Combat-support Vehicle (XC2V) Design Challenge, launched on February 3.

The basic idea behind this new challenge was to see how a community of people would envision the combat-support vehicle of the future. DARPA says it tried to find out whether a crowd would be responsible with creating a valid design, how fast it will do it and, above all, how it would look like. The answers to all those questions were given this week.

DARPA announced the final three winning designs; they are the FLYPMODE, created by American, Victor Garcia, KRATOS, also designed by an American, Marc Senger, and a concept created by French Style and Design Studio.

These designs were the closest to what DARPA was after: body designs for two different missions-Combat Reconnaissance and Combat Delivery & Evacuation vehicles. The next step in the DARPA experiment is to submit the designs to further crowd-based scrutiny.

“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,” DARPA said.