Online Community Co-Creates a Military Vehicle

Participants in the challenge submitted their designs online for review. Feedback from the community of more than 12,000 designers and enthusiasts enabled participants to incorporate ideas and concepts from their peers, helping to create a better vehicle in an open source process.

After receiving and validating more than 150 design entries, Victor Garcia’s FLYPMode design was named the winner of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Crowd-derived Combat-support vehicle (XC2V) Design Challenge and was subsequently built into an operational prototype.

Dassault Systèmes, a leading company in 3D Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions, announced today (August 1) that it has teamed with Local Motors (Chandler, AZ) to deliver the first co-created military vehicle.

Local Motors’ community was asked to develop a vehicle body design that could support two types of missions – Combat Reconnaissance and Combat Delivery & Evacuation. Thanks to Dassault Systèmes’ Version 6 platform and Local Motors’ expertise in crowd-based design and manufacturing, it is stated that the winning vehicle went from concept to working prototype in less than six months.

“Dassault Systèmes is a natural partner choice for us on this project,” said Jay Rogers, CEO of Local Motors. “We both see the future of product creation based upon an open process where we gain wisdom from the masses in order to deliver truly relevant products. We could not have achieved the same outcome on this project without their intuitive design and collaboration tools and support.”

Dassault Systèmes’ 3DVIA Composer was provided to each design participant as part of the project ignition kit; CATIA was used for packaging and component designs; ENOVIA was used to store and manage both CATIA and SolidWorks design data; and SIMULIA was used for virtual testing and analysis.

With a focus on streamlining product development, Local Motors is pioneering a new manufacturing paradigm based upon online crowdsourcing for product co-creation where a virtual community collaborates to leverage the collective knowledge base in order to develop the most optimal solution.