Meet the Robutt: the robotic butt Ford uses to test its car seats

Ford has built itself a mechanical butt, dubbed the Robutt, which it uses to test its car seats.

As seen via Quartz, the carmaker explains in a video how it covers its seats with a pressure sensitive mat to help understand how people get in an out of vehicles. Using this information they can adjust the seat to make sure it’ll stay comfortable over its lifetime. And to test this, they deploy the Robutt — a stuffed torso fixed on the end of an industrial robotic arm which “sits” on a prototype chair again and again and again. Ford says with this method they can recreate 10 years’ of use in just three weeks.

As enlightening as the Robutt is, this is far from the first robotic butt we’ve seen. For example, it’s well known that phonemakers like Samsung and LG also use robot butts to test whether their devices will bend when sat on. How’s that for robots taking human jobs.

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