You are walking down the street with a friend. A shot is fired. The two of you duck behind the nearest cover and you pull out your smartphone. A map of the neighborhood pops up on its screen with a large red arrow pointing in the direction the shot came from.

It’s black. It’s a bit bigger than a breadbox. It has four knobby wheels, a water nozzle sticking out the back and it can really scoot.

It’s the one-fifth-scale model amphibious vehicle that a team of Vanderbilt engineering students designed and built for a national competition, called the Model-Based Amphibious Racing Competition (MBARC), which took place in mid-January at the Camp Pendleton Marine Corps Base in southern California.

FANG stands for Fast, Adaptive, Next-Generation Ground Vehicle and it’s a challenge.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) recently launched FANG Challenges, a set of three next-generation military vehicle design competitions with up to $4 million in prizes to build a new amphibious combat vehicle specifically for the Marine Corps. Vanderbilt’s Institute for Software Integrated Systems (ISIS) is playing a significant role in the contests.

A half dozen undergraduates gathered in the Featheringill Hall cyber-physical lab on a Wednesday afternoon to figure out ways to make a radio-controlled car do some pretty cool stuff. Students manipulated computer-aided design models on multiple screens near a table strewn with car parts and molded plastic models. What seemed like child’s play was so much more.