The College of Engineering is proud to announce that Tech has been selected as a winner of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Manufacturing Experimentation and Outreach (MENTOR) program, which will be directed by Dr. Daniel P. Schrage, Professor in the School of AE and Director of the Integrated Product Lifecycle Engineering Laboratory, and Dr. David Rosen, Professor in the School of ME and Director of the Rapid Prototyping & Manufacturing Institute.  This four year, $10M program is aimed at introducing design and manufacturing education through social networking to 1000 high schools nationally and around the world.

DARPA is aggressively pursuing a set of loosely integrated programs called Adaptive Vehicle Make.  Adaptive Vehicle Make is a portfolio of programs that address revolutionary approaches to the design, verification, and manufacturing of complex defense systems and vehicles.  

The MENTOR effort is focused on engaging high school-age students in a series of collaborative design and distributed manufacturing experiments.  DARPA envisions deploying up to a thousand computer-numerically-controlled additive manufacturing machines—more commonly known as “3D printers”—to high schools nationwide.  The goal is to engage students across clusters of schools to collaborate via social networking media to jointly design and build systems of moderate complexity, such as mobile robots and go-carts, in response to prize challenges.