Safety Testing: Robotic Road Rage

Safety Testing: Robotic Road Rage Ford Motor Company engineers are using robots to crash shopping carts, bicycle wheels and balls into vehicle doors to test its new state-of-the-art, pressure-based air bag sensors. These scrupulously scientific tests are part of Ford’s ongoing efforts to accelerate new collision protection and avoidance technologies as customers increasingly demand safety features.

Carts, Bikes and Balls… Oh My! Ford engineers conduct unusual tests to calibrate the sensitivity of air bag pressure sensors to help make sure minor events don’t trick the new system as it operates at amazing speeds that could deploy an air bag in less than a millisecond, literally faster than the blink of an eye.

New Tests for New Tech

Cart or Car Crash?

In one test, a lab robot repeatedly pushes a shopping cart loaded with a 110-lbs. weight – more than the average grocery order – into the vehicle doors at 10 miles per hour. Engineers use advanced computers to take thousands of sensor impact readings.

Pedaling Safety

One robotic test replicates the impact of a bicycle on the car door, helping engineers further refine the sensors to ignore this type of impact situation that likely wouldn’t be harmful to the vehicle occupant in a real-world incident.

Side air bag systems on some new Ford vehicles use pressure pulses from a side impact to deploy 30 percent faster than a traditional air bag system that uses acceleration-based sensors.

Foul Ball

Pressure-based sensors help predict crash forces before the full impact occurs and more accurately measure accident crash severity to help better differentiate between a potentially dangerous air bag-deployable crash and relatively harmless daily abuse that should not require air bag protection.

By ramming car doors with carts, wheels and a tool that replicates a hard-thrown ball, Ford engineers can calibrate the air bag sensor to disregard typically minor mishaps that happen in neighborhoods every day.

5/2009

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