Michigan based Humanetics has launched an ultra-flat robot to test ADAS vehicle safety features to ensure greater protection for pedestrians. The UFOnano is an ultra-flat over-runnable robot platform (UFO) designed as a low-maintenance compact ADAS safety device to run fully autonomous pedestrian and collision mitigation testing.

Humanetics says that existing tools on the market were too big, and a compact testing solution was required. The Humanetics solution is designed to provide greater accuracy in VRU testing and meet the market need for more realistic test scenarios and pedestrian behaviour.

The UFOnano can drive a curve in every radius and even ‘turn on the spot’ for more representative real-life test scenarios mimicking true-to-life pedestrian behaviour. With a very low profile, it is small enough to perform pedestrian ‘swarm testing’– where five or more vehicles are tested simultaneously. An integrated RTK-GPS system provides high accuracy to the very low profile over-runnable unit.

The UFOnano platform is integrated into the Humanetics UFO base control environment for complex testing using up to nine robots from the Humanetics family. It is designed for commonly-used VRU dummies as well as for the next generation of sophisticated human replicas.

Markus Schmidl, Humanetics’ Global Director of Active Safety Sales said: “We are very proud of the UFOnano as the newest addition to our Humanetics product portfolio. We started in the active safety business more than 10 years ago when we were approached by a client to develop a platform that a test car could run over without damage. So, we created an ultra-flat over-runnable robot for active safety testing, which is now known as the UFOpro and used by many Euro NCAP labs, TIER1s and car manufacturers all over the world. We are convinced that this new UFOnano robotic platform will further help us to improve road safety for vulnerable road users and bring us one step closer to protecting human potential.”