Ford uses autonomos vehicles to test their models
It would appear that Ford is claiming a first, the first carmaker to use autonomous vehicles in their durability tests.
The autonomous vehicles were developed by Ford engineers and Utah-based Autonomous Solutions Inc, and make use of robotic technology to drive cars during accelerated high-impact on- and off-road durability tests.
These ‘robot’ cars are in use now at Ford’s Michigan proving grounds, and are able to tackle tests designed to compress ten years of daily driving abuse into a couple of courses a couple of hundred meters long made up of alternating surfaces of broken concrete, cobblestone, metal gates, rough gravel, mud pits and oversized speed bumps.
There are clear advantages to using robots for some of the durability tests because some of these are very physically taxing for human drivers and there are many restrictions for exposure time. With the help of autonomous test vehicles, engineers can run an almost unlimited number of repeat tests until they’re satisfied with the amount of data points.
According to Ford vehicle development operations manager Dave Payne, the robotic tests has allowed the company to meet vehicle development time lines while also not risking the safety of actual human drivers.
He mentioned that with the help of these autonomous vehicles, they have increased the productivity of other programs because human drivers could be redeployed to some other areas – like noise level and vehicle dynamics testing, while also accelerating the durability tests.
The vehicles are operated by a robotic control module installed in the test vehicle controlling the steering, acceleration and braking, the module being programmed to follow a particular course. The position of the car is then tracked via cameras and GPS with the engineers being capable of stopping and correcting the vehicle or restarting a test at any time.
These autonomous systems have very little in common with the technologies developed for autonomous streets, they’re meant to work in a very limited sense and for what they do, they obviously work great.
