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DARPA Launches MENTOR Initiative for Students

DARPA is launching a new 4-year, $10 million initiative called MENTOR to engage students in defense manufacturing. The goal is to deploy programmable manufacturing equipment like 3D printers to high schools and organize engineering competitions to design systems like go-carts and robots. DARPA plans to partner with 10 schools in year 2, 100 schools by year 3, and 1000 schools by year 4. MENTOR aims to inspire the next generation of defense manufacturers and support DARPA's larger effort to compress development timelines and democratize innovation in the defense industry.

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54 views1 page

DARPA Launches MENTOR Initiative for Students

DARPA is launching a new 4-year, $10 million initiative called MENTOR to engage students in defense manufacturing. The goal is to deploy programmable manufacturing equipment like 3D printers to high schools and organize engineering competitions to design systems like go-carts and robots. DARPA plans to partner with 10 schools in year 2, 100 schools by year 3, and 1000 schools by year 4. MENTOR aims to inspire the next generation of defense manufacturers and support DARPA's larger effort to compress development timelines and democratize innovation in the defense industry.

Uploaded by

pimptyty
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© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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News Release

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency


3701 North Fairfax Drive
Arlington, VA 22203-1714

IMMEDIATE RELEASE September 28, 2010

DARPA Looks to Inspire Next Generation of Defense Manufacturers


Four-year, $10M manufacturing outreach effort launched to engage students
Recently, United States President Barack Obama said, “Our success as a nation depends on strengthening
America’s role as the world’s engine of discovery and innovation.” That engine of innovation is especially
important within the national defense arena and the science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields.
Such skills are critical for careers in systems design and manufacturing, and a strong manufacturing base is
essential to maintaining a well-built defense. To reignite a passion for exploration among our nation’s youth, the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is launching its Manufacturing Experimentation and
Outreach (MENTOR) initiative.

For MENTOR, DARPA will contract multiple organizations to deploy a variety of programmable
manufacturing equipment, such as 3D printers, to high schools throughout the country and orchestrate a series of
prize-based challenges to encourage competition and collaboration within high school teams as they design and
build cyber-electro-mechanical systems. “The systems will be of moderate complexity,” said Paul Eremenko,
DARPA program manager. “Challenges will involve the design and building of things like go-carts, mobile
robots and small unmanned aircraft. And we’ll encourage collaboration during the challenges through the use of
social media and social networking applications.”

Eremenko envisions a significant deployment of technology to schools. “DARPA will pilot this activity with 10
high schools by our second year and expand to 100 by the third year, with plans for 1,000 by the fourth,” said
Eremenko. To reach this goal, DARPA released a draft solicitation, explicitly encouraging small businesses,
non-profits, academia and other non-traditional U.S. and international researchers with capabilities in science,
technology, engineering and mathematics to submit proposals for executing the four-year, $10M MENTOR
initiative.

MENTOR is part of DARPA’s Adaptive Vehicle Make (AVM) program, a larger effort to dramatically
compress development timelines for future defense vehicles, shift the product value chain toward high value-
added design activities and democratize the innovation process. AVM seeks a “fab-less” approach to design of
correct-by-construction cyber-electro-mechanical systems, a foundry-style bitstream programmable
manufacturing capability and a crowd-sourcing infrastructure for development of vehicle systems similar to
open-source software today. AVM will culminate in a prize-based design and fabrication of a next-generation
infantry fighting vehicle for the U.S. Army. MENTOR’s role is to help ensure a competitive next-generation
workforce to enable and sustain this new design and manufacturing construct developed by AVM.
-END-

Interested parties may attend the virtual Adaptive Vehicle Make Proposers’ Day. Additional information and
registration instructions are available at:
http://go.usa.gov/xwR
Draft versions of the MENTOR solicitation may be found at:
http://go.usa.gov/xwN
Media with inquiries, contact DARPA Public Affairs, DARPAPublicAffairsOffice@darpa.mil

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