Georgia Tech has been announced as the winner of The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Manufacturing Experimentation and Outreach (MENTOR) program.  Subject to negotiation, this potential four year, $10M program is aimed at introducing design and manufacturing education through social networking to 1000 high schools nationally and around the world.

The Georgia Tech winning MENTOR proposal includes faculty, researchers and educators across campus. It will be led by two professors with extensive experience in the design and manufacturing of complex systems and an outreach director well known for his innovative programs. Dr. Daniel P. Schrage, Professor in the School of AE and Director of the Integrated Product Lifecycle Engineering (IPLE) Laboratory, and Dr. David Rosen, Professor in the School of ME and Director of the Rapid Prototyping & Manufacturing Institute (RPMI), are the Co-PIs for the Georgia Tech MENTOR Program. Mr. Anthony Docal, Orbit Education Inc., who works with organizations across campus on outreach programs, such as the Georgia Tech Space Grants Consortium, CEISMC and DLPE, will be the MENTOR Outreach Director. 

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.  DARPA’s intent is to make a dramatic improvement on the existing systems engineering, integration, and testing process for defense systems.

The parallel, educational Manufacturing Experimentation and Outreach (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 (CNC) 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, go carts, etc., in response to prize challenges.

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