Pentagon dishes out funding for rapid manufacturing technologies

Boeing nabbed a $3.7 million contract with the Pentagon’s venture wing to develop new processes to rapidly manufacture defense parts, contract databases reveal.

The money comes out of a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency program called Open Manufacturing, which will seed technology to accelerate and lower the costs of manufacturing.

The funding project aims to address the difficulty of making systems that may not be widely deployed and more inefficient to produce, even when they are mission-critical. “Many high-profile defense systems have suffered from extensive delays and cost escalation during testing and early production due to difficulties incurred in the course of manufacturing key components and subassemblies,” a contracting document said.

DARPA, in response, has solicited ideas for faster production methods and manufacturing processes that can be adapted in the event of supply shocks. It also requested ways to measure the probability of failure of new processes so that engineers can better weigh risks, according to contract documents.

The solicitation for proposals has closed. Multiple awards have been planned.

Among them, superconductor-maker Grid Logic got $700,000 to develop technology for making metal components with 3D additive machining, which manufactures parts layer by layer, databases show. DARPA also dished out $1.2 million to technology developer Softwear Automation to create an unmanned sewing machine that will speed up and automate garment manufacturing.