Meet RUTH, the Touchy Feely Robot That Pokes Car Interiors For a Living (Video)

RUTH pokes and prods car interiors checking for comfort and quality (Photos: Ford Motor Company)

RUTH isn’t the ideal passenger. She’ll spend the entire time poking the seats, pushing all the buttons and flicking the air conditioner vents back and forth. She’s like a sugared-up 5-year-old, only instead of candy she’s powered by electrical wires, and instead of being annoying because she’s bored, she’s just doing her job.

RUTH is a robot. Her full name is the Robotized Unit for Tactility and Haptics. And she’s designed to tell car makers when the materials in their vehicles have just the right amount of softness, roughness, temperature, hardness and comfort that we as customers want. So earlier this year, Ford brought RUTH from Europe to their Michigan product development center to help them create cars with just the right amount of everything we want in a car’s interior materials.

See RUTH in action

“Quality” can be difficult to express, yet when we sit in a high-end car, we know by the feel of the trim and the touch of the buttons that the car is special and well-crafted. The sense of touch and the intuitive understanding of quality are innately human characteristics, but how do you measure them? How do you quantify something like seat comfort or a “satisfying” button push?

“Before RUTH, many engineers had access only to hand-held measuring tools, and no means to test the interiors in a manner that resembled in-vehicle scenarios,” says Luke Robinson, Ford metrologist and RUTH technician. “An engineer outside of our department might even have pushed a dictionary and a pop can into an armrest to measure its resistance and softness.”

RUTH and engineer Luke Robinson test a seat's comfort

Now, with this new technology, Ford has taken data from decades of worldwide consumer feedback and entered them into RUTH. Then RUTH takes her giant, 6-jointed, robotic arm and pokes the trims, turns the knobs, pushes the buttons and interacts with many of the vehicle’s interior areas in the same way a person would. She then “tells” the engineers which option is the best and finest, and Ford puts it into production. This allows Ford to tailor each vehicle interior to exactly what a customer group wants.

The result is the ability to put high-end products into cars faster, with less testing time, allowing them to be more affordable and within reach of a larger group of customers. And for that, we’ll put up with a little poking and prodding.