The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced in an Aug. 2 news release it is seeking proposals for a new program in the agency’s multi-year, $2-billion AI Next Campaign.
The Symbiotic Design for Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) program looks to introduce artificial intelligence (AI) and automation into the CPS design process, which DARPA said currently requires a significant amount of manual, skilled engineering work and creates long design cycles.
“Current approaches to designing cyber-physical systems are largely manual, costly, and inefficient, sometimes taking decades to complete,” said Dr. Sandeep Neema, a DARPA Information Innovation Office program manager. “To support the rapidly evolving defense landscape, we need a way of accelerating and streamlining CPS design – one that could take advantage of new machine learning and automation capabilities,” he said.
Symbiotic Design looks to fuse model-based design with machine learning to create a core of AI-enabled tools that designers can deploy to accelerate the CPS process from a design concept to developed system.
“The tools will support the search, composition, evaluation, and exploration of knowledge bases and design corpora, and will come together to form an AI-enabled co-designers that provides its human counterparts with a true designed partner,” DARPA added.
The ultimate goal of the program is to exchange ideas between human and AI designers to allow the CPS to “‘autocomplete’ the design based on past learnings or experience.” Once a human designer has selected a potential design, the CPS AI will automate the evaluation of the design’s points using domain-specific analysis and simulation tools.
DARPA also wants the AI solution to have a user-friendly interface to facilitate the human-machine collaboration so that the design process is accessible to more individuals and reduces the need for skilled experts to utilize the tool.
DARPA will hold a proposers’ day Aug. 12 at the DARPA Conference Center for potential proposers to learn more about the Symbiotic Design program.