RUTH testung the chair surface (via Ford)
In an effort to provide potential customers with a level of comfort specifically centered on personal preference, Ford has hired a type of robotic comfort contraption called RUTH to deliver us from the ‘one-size-fits-all’ standard. RUTH (Robotized Unit for Tactility and Haptics), a modified packaging arm, features 6 joints that enable it to simulate human motor skills which allows it to test multiple criterion such as softness, roughness and temperature of newly designed vehicles. The robot can (and does) prod and poke the vehicles interior much in the same fashion of humans, like pushing buttons on the dash, turning knobs on the radio or testing the ‘plushness’ of the seats.
Ford states that the company still relies on human input through exhaustive Q&A surveys, but they uses RUTH to correlate that data into precise measurements for the final iteration of the vehicles interior without being biased. This gives the companies engineers a valuable option over hand-tools to gain precise measurements of vehicle interiors as well as testing the resistance and softness of surfaces (some engineers used dictionaries and pop cans to test these attributes in arm-rests and center consoles). While Ford has been using RUTH at their European Research Center (Merkenich Technical Centre) in Germany for several years and has recently ported the robot to American shores due to its success in the EU. RUTH has had its first initial involvement in the US helping to insure the interior quality of the 2013 Ford Fusion, which the company states will provide a ‘luxury car interior’ on a moderately priced vehicle.
Cabe