The Ford company automates everything, including car seats. Within its work team, it has the KUKA “Robutt” robot.The goal of the Robutt is to ensure that the automaker’s seats offer durability and comfort.
How Does it Work?
Robutt seems to be focused on “a big man of médium size”. The engineers used pressure maps to create a “hanger pattern,” which allows them to measure wear and tear on the materials using Robutt to simulate the most common ways drivers enter and exit the vehicle.
Its operation is as follows.
It essentially consists of a soft pad attached to a Ford Kuka robot. A half gallon of water is used to simulate human sweat, and the robot “sits, bounces, and rolls over” several times. It is designed to simulate ten years of constant use in the seat in three days.
Two of the robots were used to test new car seats at a Ford research center in Germany. The experiments are very extensive and include around 25,000 artificial car seat movements for each new seat configuration.
At Ford’s European headquarters in Cologne, Germany, Svenja Froehlich, a Durability Engineer commented that “From the first moment we get into a car, the seat creates an impression of comfort and quality. Previously, we used pneumatic cylinders that just moved up and down. We can now fairly and accurately simulate how people actually behave all thanks to Robutt.”
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